IE7 beta2

I thought it was about time I took a spin with IE7 beta2. The reason to see how the sites I built in the last couple of years looked in IE7 and what remedial work was required.

I was pleas­antly sur­prised, other than this blog, all the other sites are work­ing fine. Work­Life Bal­ance which uses a png back­ground to get the semi trans­par­ent menu bar in all other browsers except IE6 and below. Which gets feed by con­di­tional com­ments an addi­tional stylesheet which replaces the png with a solid back­ground and then uses a IE only fil­ter to reduce the opa­city of that div. IE7 beta2 flew through that site and most of the other sites built in the last 15 months or so. Because those sites feed IE6 and below an addi­tional stylesheet by con­di­tional com­ments and IE7 gets the same style sheets as Fire­fox, Safari, Opera and every­body else and appears to behave as a good CSS citizen.

The one prob­lem I noticed on the sites using an older tem­plate, like Labour Rela­tions was the a:hover not work­ing as expec­ted, fail­ing to high­light items in the drop down menus, and no remov­ing the high­light col­our when not be hovered over in the left hand menus. How­ever, that should be an easy fix, see­ing it works in the updated tem­plate, like Resources Safety. Two choices, updat­ing the beha­viour (.htc) file used to get IE6 and below to work with drop­down menus, or put the beha­viour (.htc) file in a stylesheet that only gets served to IE6 and below.

Off course there is always an excep­tion and it is this blog. The first is the menu bar that runs across the top and bot­tom of all pages. For some reason IE7 cal­cu­lates the meas­ure­ments as does IE6 and below, totally dif­fer­ent to me, Fire­fox, Safari and Opera. That could be eas­ily fixed by remov­ing the fix from the IE6 and below stylesheet and cre­at­ing a stylesheet that is served all ver­sions of IE. How­ever, as I have never got that menubar the way I wanted I will redesign this blog instead.

One of the strangest bug I have ever seen is hap­pen­ing with the stand­ard Word­Press cal­en­dar, the last char­ac­ter of any act­ive link turn invis­ible. They are still act­ive, it is not a prob­lem with the back­ground image, because I have tested that. There is some­thing in how IE7b2 deals with the CSS I used, that freaked it out . At the moment I will not wor­ried about it, because a Microsoft beta is not a Google beta, in other words we will get a pro­duc­tion ver­sion sooner rather than later, plus I will prob­ably lose those back­ground images in the redesign and that will prob­ably solved the prob­lem. All the other WP2 cal­en­dars I looked at are work­ing as expec­ted in IE7b2

Over­all IE7b2 is an inter­est­ing beta, there are bugs, it does not behave as expec­ted. How­ever, the most import­ant thing about this release is the dir­ec­tion Microsoft are tak­ing with IE. They are put­ting in fea­tures for the cus­tomer: tabbed browser­ing, phish­ing fil­ters, RSS feeds, cleaner and bet­ter organ­ised inter­face and I expect more fea­tures found in Fire­fox, Opera and Safari to make their way to IE7. For developers, IE7 are finally get­ting ser­i­ous about web stand­ards and they are adding real tools like the DevTool­Bar it will not replace Fire­fox and the Web Developer Exten­sion on my PC, but it is a move in the right direction.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 7:02 pm and is filed under css and html . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.