Good News For IE7
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According to a post on the IE blog today, the final release of IE7 will be fixing a lot of the bugs that have been reported over the past 4 years in IE6. Most of these won’t show up until beta 2 is released (and hopefully that will be a public release). Read the full list of bugs that were fixed over at the IEBlog.
In addition to those bug fixes, they also announced that they will be adding support for the follow:
- HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
- Improved (though not yet perfect)
- CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
- CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
- Alpha channel in PNG images
- Fix :hover on all elements
- Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body
While this is great news (especially the Alpha PNG support and fixed positioning support), will it really make that big of a difference in how we create sites? IE6 will still continue to dominate the browser market, especially in the corporate world where it is expensive to upgrade thousands of computers to Windows XP (the only OS that IE7 will be available for).
Even more of a concern is how these fixes will affect the sites that we have already built using the various work arounds.
I guess this is all yet to be seen, and the faster Microsoft can get an open beta of the browser out, the better.
July 30th, 2005
Well, better late than never, I guess?
Anyways, for me, :hover working on all elements will (as IE7 is adopted, of course) finally get rid of messy, lengthy, and redundant onmouseover and onmouseout javascript that can be functionally replaced by a short line of CSS.
Of course, I’d still prefer people switch to Firefox, where :hover already does work as intended.
August 1st, 2005
The IE7 bugfixes will be nice but it’ll be a long, long time before we see the light at the end of the IE6 tunnel.
August 13th, 2005
damage has been done and firefox certainly did its bit.
It will be a long way road for IE to regain what it lost to firefox.