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IE7: The List is In

By Molly E. Holzschlag | August 22nd, 2006 | Filed in Browsers, General, Microsoft TF, Web Standards (general)

A comprehensive list of bug fixes, implementations and developer/designer resources for IE7 has been published by Markus Mielke of Microsoft (and also a member of the W3C CSS Working Group) on the IEBlog today.

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The list, which includes 200 issues that have been addressed including such coveted features as alpha transparency support for PNGs; the :hover dynamic pseudo class available for all elements; and min/max width supports.

More details and views on what was fixed, what wasn’t and how to prepare your sites for IE7 are available via Markus’ post.

The work Microsoft has done in IE7 is impressive, and I am confident that it is a significant step forward in the improvement across all browsers.

Your Replies

#1 On August 22nd, 2006 10:39 pm Mark replied:

Hey folks, there’s a typo in the URL.

#2 On August 22nd, 2006 10:49 pm WaSP Member mollyeh replied:

Hey Mark, my bad. Thanks for the heads up. Got it now :)

M

#3 On August 23rd, 2006 5:00 am Miha Hribar replied:

Long list :) I’ve been testing in the IE7 beta versions and some of the issues weren’t fixed yet, but I presume they will be in the final version. Shame they took out the anonymous * DOM root element though, it could’ve come in handy if problems arised.

#4 On August 23rd, 2006 8:57 am John Bradley replied:

Until now I’ve had to keep telling myself, at least they’re making some progress. It’s good to finally have a comprehensive list that I can use to support that thought.

@Miha: You wouldn’t believe the silly things I’ve had to do to get IE7 to play nice with my work! I believe Microsoft has declared the last beta feature-complete. Whether that means they’ve frozen their work on CSS support or not, I do not know. There are still a few CSS tricks we can put up our sleeves for when IE7 misbehaves, though…

#5 On August 23rd, 2006 9:11 am Mike Cherim replied:

Maybe if we’re lucky, IE 7, once released, can be installed on a MS “Patch Tuesday” and we can say good-bye to IE6 forever. Then we can really embrace some of those list items like the PNG support. Ah, just dreaming I suppose.

I made all my stuff IE7-ready — and continue to do so — ever since beta 2′s release when I got the word I the rendering engine was final.

Thanks for pointing out the list Molly. It’s good stuff.

#6 On August 23rd, 2006 11:15 am Andy Couch replied:

Mike, unfortunately IE7 will only be for XP SP2 and above. So even though a huge majority of folks will be upgraded when it’s released as a critical update, we’ll still have all the 98, Me, and 2000 folks running IE6 until they finally upgrade their OS. So it’s probably going to be a long while before we can say good-bye to IE6 forever.

#7 On August 23rd, 2006 12:05 pm at Vocino.com replied:

[...] A comprehensive list of bug fixes, implementations and developer/designer resources for IE7 has been published today over at WaSP. Check it. [...]

#8 On August 23rd, 2006 11:28 pm Mike Cherim replied:

Darn Andy, right you are. I was enjoying the dream. You just snapped me back to reality.

#9 On August 24th, 2006 8:42 pm Matt Robin replied:

Andy Couch and Mike Cherim: Yeah, not only will IE6 remain in use until people upgrade their OS…but with an anticipated (and delayed) launch of Vista on the near horizon…many users might not even bother with XP SP2 and wait even longer for Vista to emerge…which will require hardware upgrades too (probably)…adding more delays to users uninstalling IE6…(keep those box-model hacks handy for now guys!)

#10 On August 24th, 2006 11:23 pm ChadL replied:

Exactly…

Playing antagonist here; so many of us web developers have been eagerly awaiting IE7′s arrival, and so many fail to see IE7 will only be available to a subset of those current IE6 users.

:(

Myself; I have been slowly weaning the sites I’m working on over to using conditional comments rather than the traditional CSS filters. I’m anticipating IE7 to have it’s own (new?) rendering issues so this – at least to me – seems like a safe approach to take.

#11 On August 25th, 2006 2:03 am Miha Hribar replied:

Yeah but those conditional comments look and feel so, well, dirty :) I try to avoid them as much as possible, but I guess this will be the easiest way to accomodate the visitors on IE7. Has anybody found any IE7 specific hacks?

#12 On August 25th, 2006 4:30 am Wouter replied:

- Does the list mean IE7 will support attribute selectors? For example, one of the things I want to do is add a background image (PDF icon) each time the string ‘.pdf’ is discovered in the href attribute.

- Does the ‘background:fixed’ work mean that I can, for example, keep a menu bar at the top while the rest of the page scrolls, and the browsers that don’t support it will scroll all (like they do now)?

#13 On August 26th, 2006 8:54 pm Mike Cherim replied:

@ChadL: Fortunately I’ve had IE7 for a while (starting with beta 2 when the word was out that the rendering engine was final) and have bitten the bullet so to speak by going through all my sites, and those of my current and former clients, and have addressed all those IE7 issues that came up — and there were a few. Fortunately now I can say bring it on; I’m ready (and all my new stuff is tested on the beta 3 build as par for the course). It was a bit of a drag, and there were some issues, but they’re all fixed. The biggest pain for me was addressing the “whitespace bug” on some of my nav lists, but was fixable by specifying a width; the easiest fix was the new “hover bug” on imported style sheets by simply adding a:hover {} (with empty curly braces) to the CSS import statement.

#14 On August 28th, 2006 11:01 am Brady J. Frey replied:

Still, it’ll become the mac IE of the web – it’s caught up, but it’ll be years until they pass the features in firefox, opera, or safari. So now I can stress a little less that my builds won’t break, but higher end features we have to wait… another 5 years? I see the reason for praise, but it feels like patting the slow kid on the back for doing such ‘a nice job’ – we’re comparing them to a scale all their own, not by the industry ambitious.

#15 On September 3rd, 2006 12:17 pm Raoul Mengis replied:

The menu and sub-menu not possible :-(

Example: see this 9 links:

http://www.1computer.info/1work_internet_en.html

CSS2 from IE7 is not finish, complete, to W3C specification.

#16 On September 11th, 2006 4:27 am Tahir Khalid replied:

I’ve been running IE7 RC1 along side Firefox, Opera and IE6 (no easy task getting both IE’s to work alongside each other :/ )

I am still not impressed with IE7 and feel Microsoft have done too much work to make it “vista” compliant rather than web standards compliant.

Its okay trying to compete with Safari et-al but if your underlying core is still as flakey as its previous incarnations then your doomed. I have found numerous problems with the way IE7 renders pages and elements. Sure its much more along the road in comparison to IE6 but when your someone who tries to follow the standards and expects at a very least, equal ability to Firefox.. well as you can imagine I am dissappointed but not surprised.

I’ve heard rumor’s Microsoft themselves are admitting that we won’t get a completely compliant browser until IE8, probably by which point I will have given up on it all together which is a shame.

To really address the problems Microsoft needs to do a total rewrite of the browser as the truth is its still using a core that is out of date by a huge margin, much like their Operating System which needs a rethink and rewrite from the ground up.

Unfortunately due to the tie-in nature of MS and a reason why they will continue to trudge their crappy software on us means developers like us will have to put up with handicapping ourselves each time we develop a site as we have to take 10 steps back just to make sure IE is not falling over tring to display a simple element every other browser cans no issues with.

We live in hope :-)

#17 On October 19th, 2006 4:16 am kenneth himschoot replied:

it’s here! IE7 final is available as a download, the highly recommended update through windows update for windows xp users will start in november.

#18 On November 9th, 2006 3:18 pm Jacquie replied:

Please look at http://www.afpncoh.org/2006npd/sponsors.htm. In IE6, there are cameras and links to jpg’s and pdf’s. There’s even a “Vew Ad” with a link to a pdf. None of these show up when viewed in IE7. Ideas?

#19 On February 13th, 2007 10:04 am purposemakers » A comprehensive list of bug fixes, implementations and developer/designer resources for IE7 replied:

[...] http://www.webstandards.org/2006/08/22/ie7-the-list-is-in/ [...]

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