Internet Explorer 7 is here…

The day is finally upon us: Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 to the world. To put this in perspective, this is the first major browser update from Microsoft since August of 2001. In Internet time, that’s like a billion years. Currently available only via download, IE7 will be installed on all PCs running Windows as an automatic update on November 1.

The good news

Microsoft has added lots of new features including tabbed browsing, RSS detection, Shrink-to-Fit printing (finally) and some others which you can read about here. More importantly, IE7 does a much better job supporting web standards. Kudos to the IE7 team for working hard to improve a notoriously buggy browser.

The not-so-good news

Despite progress, IE’s support for standards has a ways to go. The rendering engine – that’s the bit that displays web sites in all their glory – is still lacking. In short, aspects of some sites across the Internet will appear ‘broken’ in IE7 until the new kinks have been worked out of the system.

At Duo, we’ve built standards-based sites since 2002, and have been following the development of IE 7 for some time. Since the final spec of what would and wouldn’t be fixed changed many times throughout the development of IE’s new browser, we took the approach of blocking our IE specific layout “hacks” from IE 7. We are now able to test against the public version of the browser, and will quickly find the issues that will require further “hacking.”

The better news

Most of the problems we’ve seen so far are fairly easily remedied. However, every site is a little different, which means we have a lot of testing to do.

Initial impressions: thumbs (cautiously) up

New browsers (most notably Firefox) have raised the level of standards support to new heights. IE is catching up, but as we’ve mentioned, they’ve still got ground to cover. Fortunately, they’re moving down the right path.  We’re looking forward to coding fewer IE-specific styles, and to more uniform browser support for standards.