IE7 beta 1 release
So Microsoft released the first beta of IE7. Supposedly this is pretty big news to the web developer community, but personally, I couldn't even be bothered trying it out myself. Plenty of other people are doing that already, anyway. Going by their first impressions, here are my thoughts on IE7 beta 1.
Going straight to the crux of the matter, IE7 still doesn't quite support CSS2. Microsoft points out that:
Internet Explorer 7 includes fixes for issues with the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) feature. Both the peekaboo and guillotine bugs have been addressed, and work on other issues is under way to provide web developers with reliable and robust CSS functionality.
Very well, two bugs are fixed. Sorta. However, there are quite a few CSS2 bugs remaining that have been known for quite some time. Many of which could've been fixed as well, I would say, given the time they've spent so far on developing this beta. Okay, okay, "work on other issues is under way" - this is only the very first beta, after all.
The problem is that it's hard to believe that all that much will be changed. There is one other major improvement for us developers that IE7 has, and that is alpha transparency support for PNG's. Great! But where are CSS 2 selectors, where is XHTML support, where is proper event handling, and also, where the hell is Atom support? Okay, fine, I'm asking for too much too soon, but a guy can hope! And be impatient.
I am beginning to wonder, though, if the IE Team has spent most of their time working solely on the interface (tabs and odd menu placement) and only tossed in some quick CSS bugfixes to keep the hordes of developers off their backs for the time being. They've been talking about IE7 for a year and one week now, exactly. Along the way, they've promised improved CSS 2 support and more such features that other browsers have had for years now.
Yesterday the day came that they could have proven their good intentions by releasing a browser that pleasantly surprised even the most skeptical web developers. Instead, they release something that even the most lenient developers are disappointed by. Very easy to lose faith now, but I say, don't do it! Molly has been saying all along that we shouldn't expect much of anything at all at first. "Think long term," she says. Maybe we all should try that instead.
I guess that, yes, this was a disappointing first step for IE7, but even so, we should've expected no more than that. As much as we may all want IE7 to be a sign of great improvements in the Microsoft camp, reality once again points out that time and patience is necessary in dealing with this dinosaur of browser.
Drop the alarm bells and put down the pitch forks. Have some tea, and give them time. Let's first see how the development cycle from one public release to the next goes before we nail them to a cross.
Chris Wilson of the IE Blog has made the most wonderful post about IE7 Beta 2:
In IE7, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that web developers hit as we can, and we will add the critical most-requested features from the standards as well. Though you won't see (most of) these until Beta 2, we have already fixed the following bugs from PositionIsEverything and Quirksmode:
- Peekaboo bug
- Guillotine bug
- Duplicate Character bug
- Border Chaos
- No Scroll bug
- 3 Pixel Text Jog
- Magic Creeping Text bug
- Bottom Margin bug on Hover
- Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
- IE/Win Line-height bug
- Double Float Margin Bug
- Quirky Percentages in IE
- Duplicate indent
- Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
- 1 px border style
- Disappearing List-background
- Fix width:auto
In addition we've added support for the following
- HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
- Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback
- 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
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All times are in CET. It is now 19:44.
Tea always works in these instances. Nice, refreshing, herbal tea.
I really don't get the very disappointed people though. If you have low expectations, as you should with these things, nothing is really surprising.
Yeah. I'm hoping that what they say in the Technical Overview means they are planning on seriously improving the CSS2 capabilities for the next beta. Lets hope so, at least.
Doesn't bother me in the slightest. It was pretty obvious from day one what this was.
Basically a security patch, and interface update that is given a version number bump to combat the Firefox effect. Simple as that. MS developers may care about standards, but that it not in the product pipeline right now.
They are basically told: We need tabbed browsing, RSS, and these security fixes, and we need it by July 2005.
I reckon they've done their best to get as many CSS fixes in as they can to try and keep us developers happy - but as I say that is not in the official MS blueprint. I wouldn't be surprised if the IE team ended up doing rendering fixes in their own time.
And they're still gonna get ripped to shreds by us lot. Poor sods.
"And they're still gonna get ripped to shreds by us lot. Poor sods."
Heh. How true.
Atom-support will be in the beta 2 (of Vista).
Is six years not longterm enough?
Andy,
It was to be expected indeed, but I think a lot of people simply couldn't resist getting happy and excited about the very idea that IE7 might just become pretty Standards-compliant. They just forgot that "beta 1" generally means "still a ton more to come and improve, give us time." My CMS saw a world of difference between beta 1 and the final release, for instance.
Rowan,
IE7 builds upon existing (and outdated) technology. A complete rewrite of the engine would pose the gigantic risk of breaking 90% of the existing web as we know it. That's not worth improving Standards-support to anyone, I would say.
Microsoft have to add in support through a myriad of existing code, problems, tweaks and unmentionables. That not only takes time, but it's also a process wherein you want to take baby-steps.
I just think it's pretty pathetic that people were demanding better HTML and CSS support years ago, before Atom even existed, and now Atom has not only had the time to be developed, go through IETF standardisation, and reach 1.0, but they are going to implement that and still no word on the HTML and CSS improvements other than the vague claim that there'll be some improvement. Big deal. Beta 1 contains "some improvement" - two bugfixes. Wow.
Meanwhile, years-old complaints remain unresolved. CSS 1 is almost nine years old now and still hasn't been completely implemented by Internet Explorer. I think it's very likely at this point, CSS 1 will make it to ten years old before Microsoft finish it - if they ever do. If Microsoft take the same amount of time with newer specifications, we can expect full CSS 3 support sometime after 2015 - before waiting a few more years for everybody to upgrade.
I'm sure adding complete support for CSS2 wouldn't break much, but please correct me with some examples.
Rowan,
Well, I don't know the inner workings of IE's engine. If adding in all the CSS2 selectors means tampering with the same code that takes care of rendering normal CSS2 styling, I can well imagine that it'd be very difficult to do that witout affecting the existing code.
Perhaps, but the way I see it, if they don't try, we're screwed.
How about all those poor folks who have something like this Holly Hack:
* html { height:1%; }Complete support for CSS2 would be no big deal: the declaration wouldn't be accepted. But what is the hasLayout problems persist, and they get rid of the anonymous ancestor of html? Or worse, what if they keep the ancestor but banish the need for hasLayout hacks? All those sites, suddenly collapsing to 1% the height of their parent...
I don't envy the Microsoft people who have to sort through all of this mess the CSS hacksters have made for them...
I noticed your mezzoblue comment - you should update your links to testers to include Shea's review.
Ben hits the nail on the head. There are so many CSS hacks that they must now keep in mind when adding even a single line of code. The idea of "fix one thing, break another" applies more to IE7 and CSS support than it has ever applied to anything else before in this scene.
J.J: link added, good idea. Shea's review is thorough. He just hadn't posted it when I started writing entry.
"There are so many CSS hacks that they must now keep in mind when adding even a single line of code."
Huh? Does moz/firefox etc. have this problem? I'm thinking not - this is the benefit of coding to the standards. The holly hack, etc are designed to not break in "standard" browsers.
the only way people should be doing CSS hacks in IE should be in tandem with IE's conditional includes to attempt to future proof the hacks. otherwise the hacks shouldn't be used at all. its not smart to rely on hacks - of course things are going to change in the future.
Good news, everyone! According to ieblog, IE7 Beta2 WILL include better standards support. (They really shouldn't call it a beta if it's not feature-complete, but that's beside the point)
It fixes a number of positioning bugs (see link for full list).
It also adds support for the following features:
* HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
* Improved (though not yet perfect) fallback
* CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
* CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
* Fix :hover on all elements
* Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body
It's not what it could be, but even this should be a big help to web designers (except for the fact that only XP SP2 or Vista users will get IE7), and the final release ought to have even more support.
"I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 (2.1, once it's been Recommended)."
Why didn't they say this a long time ago? We've been trying to get straight answers about IE7 standards support since it was announced.
"...we will not pass [the Acid2] test when IE7 ships. ...We've dug through the Acid 2 Test and analyzed IE's problems with the test in some great detail, and we've made sure the bugs and features are on our list - however, there are some fairly large and difficult features to implement, and they will not all sort to the top of the stack in IE7."
Again, an acceptable answer, but one we should've gotten a lot earlier.
Bob-omb,
Plenty of software has tons of added features during beta stage. This may not happen as much with browsers, but even then.
But, it's good to see an announced list of bugfixes for beta 2. Post updated.
"Plenty of software has tons of added features during beta stage. This may not happen as much with browsers, but even then."
Yeah and the original ideals are starting to disinegrate everywhere. Recently a VERY popular IDE changed an important API when they trasitioned from one "release candidate" to the next.
Moral: Don't get too wrapped up in the names of pre-releases :)
Just semi-btw to those who speak about feature complete in general, wouldn't it be possible that IE7 is in fact feature-complete in terms of the user experience, if you disregard how it renders webpages? Take that in mind and that everything which still has to be done is basically bug-fixing (when you consider the absense of something a bug as well).
Note, I have not used IE7 yet.
Further, I fully agree with bob-omb. ;)
Kind of a late reply, but I have only recently found the time to ponder on all the changes IE7 will bring with it.
"But what if the hasLayout problems persist, and they get rid of the anonymous ancestor of html? Or worse, what if they keep the ancestor but banish the need for hasLayout hacks?"
Though I am confident and gratefull that in the long run we will benefit from IE7, these are exactly my fears. I really hope Microsoft will not remove the * html bug, because if we add a child selector to it (* html > element), we have a new IE7 specific CSS hack, in case we need one!
I heard some people had the chance to test IE7 beta 2. Does IE7 have better CSS2 support?
would be a great thing if the new IE7 has the same standart for css like firefox already does.
IE7?
FireFox 2!=)