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Microsoft is about to release IE 7.0, and if youve been hoping that this new release would solve your development problems, prepare to be disappointed.
Besides the obvious issues with an X.0 release of anything, word has it that the new browser wont fully support CSS2 standards.
So what else is new?
Since the beginning, those of us who make Web sites for a living have had to contend with various implementations of Web “standards.” Weve coded and canoodled and hacked and browser-detected in order to get our pages to render correctly in the plethora of browsers our users came to us with.
When Microsoft pretty much won the Browser War and Netscape faded into relative obscurity, it seemed that at least if we didnt have the best browser to deal with at least we had pretty much one browser to deal with.
Then along came Firefox (and Opera, to be fair), and all of a sudden we were back in the trenches again. To everyones surprise it turned out that Firefox was a pretty nifty browser that adhered to the open standards and worked really, really well. Subsequently it caught on like wildfire, and Microsoft began to see their market share get eaten away again.
And now here comes IE 7.0, and were again going to be faced with a dilemma. Considering Microsofts overwhelming share of the market (and the fact that their browser is integrated into everything that goes on inside Windows), were going to have to continue to deal with the limitations of a substandard browser. I use the word “substandard” advisedly, because IE7.0 is coming in below the standard that the WC3 has put forth.