Wednesday, 11 October 2006 at 21:11

It’s the event we’ve all been waiting for! Well, I’ve been waiting for it.

OK, it’s not got the extension wonder or style compliance of the ever-fantastic Firefox, things don’t look as pretty as they do in Safari, it fails Acid Test 2 miserably and you’ve still got to be careful with your CSS, but the final release of Internet Explorer 7 is due this very month!

The best news of all, which was released some time ago, is that it will be pushed out via Microsoft’s Automatic Updates system, meaning that end-users are much more likely to start using it than if they had to find out about it themselves and download an installer from the website.

No, IE7 isn’t perfect. No browser is ever going to be, although some do get closer than others. Yes, Microsoft could have done more with regard to standards compliance, but what you can’t deny is that it’s an improvement. My personal favourite is that IE finally gets variable level transparency through PNG files. I love using transparencies on websites (and it just happens to fit my workflow perfectly), but all the filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader badness can really get you down. OK, I can’t escape it immediately, but when IE7 is in the majority it will at least be something I can bow-out of gracefully. Oh, and praise the big coder in the sky, it finally knows what min-height actually means.

If you’ve never used IE7 before, you finally get tabs, a phishing filter (which will initially get on your nerves and probably make some a little nervous on the privacy front), a slightly familiar tab browser and a sprinkling of Vista-ness in that you are suddenly struck by the fact your menu bar has vanished and you want to have it back. From a web designer’s POV, I only had to make one minor tweak in an IE7-only style sheet to have this site working properly, which is a big leap forward from the comedy concoction that is the IE6 version.

To cut a long story short, go get it and bask in the glory of the first real Internet Explorer revamp in ages. Then go back to trusting the faithful ‘fox. ;o)