So I download IE7...

[evkl]

because I want to give it a shot. Maybe Microsoft has done better. It crashed on me within 2 minutes of use.

Discuss.

 

[Zhen Lin]

My, talk about a first impression.

Anyway, IE7 is a nightmare for web design even though it implements a slightly more standards-compliant rendering engine, because in doing so, Microsoft has rendered many of the CSS workarounds and hacks invalid.

In any case... there is something I would like to test - transparency of PNG images on Bulbapedia (and on the Bulbagarden front page). Is it still transparent in IE 7?

 

[eX.A.K.R.]

I started using Internet Explorer 7 a few betas ago, and my first impression was that Microsoft was trying to make this wreck better, but several things were still no good; it broke the interface of McAfee Internet Security. I switched back to IE6, and did not use it again until the Release Candidate beta came out (I'm now using the final version). This time, IE7 did not break McAfee, but my main gripe was how slow the tabs were. While every other web browser has handled tabs for so long it seemed second nature for them, to IE7 it was like baby steps. Overall, however, IE7's tabbed interface is not too bad (in fact, I like it a bit better than Firefox's default tab handling - I suggest Tab Mix Plus and Tab Sidebar for a better tabbed interface in Firefox), and quite well done for a first-timer. A few web pages remain broken though, but I suspect that the main reason is not only because IE7 is still not fully standards-compliant, but also the complexity of some web pages themselves. This web page is just one example - whatever CSS behind it is just too complex for IE7 to render it correctly, although Firefox and Opera does it just fine, if not a bit slowly.

Overall, I think IE7 is the step in the right direction for Microsoft and their web browser, but it's still a distance from joining the legion of a true modern web browser.

Zhen Lin: It seems to me that Microsoft has fixed the PNG handling bug in IE7; PNGs seem to display as they should, with transparency, for me.