Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview

Back in year’s past, Microsoft enjoyed a nearly complete monopoly on the web browser, and nobody really knew what standards were. Those who did were portrayed as geeks, crazies or perfectionists. And the folks from Redmond said “Enjoy what you have – we won’t be giving you anything else until Longhorn in 2005 2006 2007.

Then came a spate of new browsers that did know what standards were, and actually began following them. For MAC users, that meant Safari and Camino; for Windows users, Opera started pushing but it was Firefox that really caught Microsoft’s attention. Suddenly, their domination of browsers plateaued and actually started to drop. At first, it was just those silly designers trying to force their ‘standards’ mantra. Then the numbers started to grow – companies started adopting Firefox, as did the government. In fact, millions of people were downloading it and the press started to make a big deal. Suddenly, IE’s ‘quirks’ were seen as fallibility, as bugs, as negatives that other browsers didn’t have. IE became the evil browser, and designers took the lead to shout the praises of these lesser-known but more compliant browsers. And IE’s market continued to wane.

So, Microsoft realized that something had to be done. And IE7 was announced (no, not that IE7), as Microsoft scrambled to hold off the upstarts who were threatening its dominance. Now, they’ve finally released it in beta form so that the world can see that they really do care.

The initial lowdown on it:

You liked Firefox – So We Copied It!

• What’s it like? •

Well, as I mentioned, it seems they took every idea that looked good in other browsers and duplicated it. Let’s look at the highlights as presented by MS themselves:

  • More streamlined Interface – the toolbars are more compact and customizable. I have to admit, this was one of my major problems with IE in the past.
  • Tool buttons that open expanded menus – So, now you aren’t tied into the menus. Where I have I seen that? Oh yeah: Firefox, Safari, Opera…
  • Tabs – well, they are only the 6th major browser to come up with this. Finally.
  • Quick Tabs – eXpose functionality is a nice touch, especially built in instead of an extension.
  • Web Searching in the Toolbar – And you can customize who you search from! Again, nice to finally have, but I’ve been using that for 2 years.
  • RSS Feeds – Yawn. Been there, done that.
  • Security Features – Microsoft-maintained lists help you ID known and suspected phishing and fraud sites. This is a good feature. I get it through my internet security suite (PC-Cillin), but nice to see that Microsoft is doing something positive on the security front.

So, that’s the tour. Basically, they’ve cloned the features that people have loved from other browsers. But what about other, less-publicized items. Anything under the hood that’s worth looking at? Yes, and no.

  • SECURITY
    • Active-X Options – By default, all active-x controls are turned off. You can activate them via the same method as IE6. With all of the problems IE has had in past with this, this was expected.
    • Cross-Domain Browsing – This “limits script on webpages from interacting with content from other domains or windows. This enhanced safeguard will further protect against malware by limiting the potential for malicious websites to manipulate flaws in other websites or cause you to download undesired content or software.” Good move, if a necessary one.
    • Address Bar Protection – every window (pop-up or otherwise) will have an address bar so you know where you are, particularly when you might be steered somewhere you don’t want. This is a nice add-on.
    • International Domain Name Spoofing – Alerts you if similar characters in the URL are not being presented in the native language, a technique used by hackers.
    • Protected Mode – Isolates the software from the OS (Vista version only)
    • Parental Controls (Vista version only)
  • TASK MANAGEMENT
    • Advanced Printing – helps avoid those 3 characters on a page or too-wide printing problems. Basically, what Firefox already does.
    • Tab Groups – allow you to open groups of tabs all at once.
    • Zoom – zoom into the page.
  • IMPROVED COMPLIANCE
    • CSS improvements – not perfect by any means, but a LOT of good improvements (see below)
    • PNG Alpha channel support – designers have been asking for this for years, and it will finally be here. Not even Firefox does this reliably.
    • Improved AJAX support – it’s growing by leaps and bounds and they have a chance to hurdle past the competition. Of course, by the time they release this, they’ll probably be behind again.

• The CSS Lowdown •

My biggest problem with IE (other than its functionality quirks) is the standards compliance. Every site I develop has to be re-developed/hacked in order to look right in IE – and God forbid that they use IE5.x, which introduces a whole bigger set of problems. Seeing them match the standards will make my – and every developers – jobs that much easier. Have some IE-only functions – that’s fine and dandy as long as they don’t mess up in non-IE browsers (for example, the gradient commands that exist now). But for chrissakes realize that the margin is NOT part of the width!!

So, how do they do with the standards compliance? Well, from the IEBlog, we got this a few months back:

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) 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

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). I think we will make a lot of progress against that in IE7 through our goal of removing the worst painful bugs that make our platform difficult to use for web developers.

In that vein, I’ve seen a lot of comments asking if we will pass the Acid2 browser test published by the Web Standards Project when IE7 ships. I’ll go ahead and relieve the suspense by saying we will not pass this test when IE7 ships.

As you can see, that’s a lot of things being fixed, which means that inherently this will be a better program? But a follow-up post adds more to it:

We had 3 objectives, in priority:

  1. Fix some really nasty bugs posted on sites like positioniseverything.net
  2. Revise parts of our existing CSS implementation to be true to the spec
  3. Add the most-requested new CSS functionality to IE

Great news. The article goes on to say they have tried to fix everything that Position is Everything had on their list, as well as resolving some long-standing position:relative bugs. They also say that they will have a true division between body and html, auto align issues and 1px border troubles. They’ve also redone their box model to allow overflow:auto, allow hover: on all elements (not just anchors), made background-attachment:fixed work on all elements and eliminated a majority of parser bugs like *html.

But the best improvements are improved selector support, such as first-child, adjacent, attribute, and even some CSS3 pre-spec selectors like prefix, suffix and substring. They do note that in order to not inconvenience their core users, all of thse improvements will only be seen on sites that use the STRICT doctype; all other pages using Quirks-mode will render as they have in the past.

• Want to Try It? •

I still have my doubts, but at least they are trying. I still think we’ll see our share of Microsoft being Microsoft, but at least IE7 is a BIG step in the right direction. If you want to give it a go, visit Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview to download a preview. I downloaded mine, and I’m going to play with it this weekend. I’ll be back with a report later.

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