Albatross!

Can I ask a seemingly simple (to me anyway) question of you?

I'm terribly confused about something here.  Why can't MS simply check IE7 against the
couple of hundred or so pages of

Index of /Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/current

located at
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/current/

and tell us what the % of the pages render correctly?  Would this be "biased" against IE7?
I really don't care about how well or poorly Opera, FF, etc. perform on these, I'm only concerned with IE7.

regards

Of course, this still makes me wonder why display:table and display:table-cell aren't supported in IE. I love those guys!

I would agree with Paul on the IE layout.  It is confusing.  I also agree with Firefox's unobtrusive find bar that gets displayed at the bottom of the screen.

I have tried IE 7 for a week or two now at home (stuck with IE6 at work), but still find myself going back into Firefox for my normal browsing.  Part of this is the bugginess in the Beta3.  Hopefully the bugs are getting reported and fixed.

Things I like about IE 7 are:
1.  Pop-up blocking.  Yes, it is available in IE6.0, but doesn't work as well as IE 7.  IE 7 appears to work the same as Firefox in blocking pop-ups.  IE 6.0's pop-up blocking seemed to be a cludged work-around.

2.  Tabbed browsing.  Finally.  In fact, IE includes an additional feature of opening multiple homepages in tabs.  The only drawback is the either/or setting on the home icon (i.e., either home refreshes all the tabbed homepages or set for one homepage).  I would like the home icon to refresh the current window with a default homepage, but allow opening of IE to include multiple homepages.  Plus, an indicator on whether to open an external homepage if not connected to a network (i.e., don't open if not connected).

3.  Does appear to be more CSS compliant.  I haven't totally checked this out.  It does crash some IE only pages, but this isn't MS's fault.  It is the web developer's fault of coding only to IE 5/6.

4.  Love the ability to change paper orientation when printing (missing from Firefox).

Things still to improve prior to release:
1.  Bugginess.  IE 7.0 crashes too much yet.

2.  Layout of top area on XP (Paul's recommended layout looks nice).  Allow for multiple layout styles (i.e., Vista-style, XP style, etc.)

Things to work on long term:
1.  CSS 2.1 compatibility.  My concern is inherit works to spec, selectors (such as :hover, :first, :last) works to spec (not just on certain elements), and box model works to spec.  Additionally, height and width, including min-height and min-width, need to work for all dimensional types (e.g., percent, pixels, ems, etc.).  One should be able to layout documents via CSS w/o having to rely on a bunch of float tricks and other CSS hacks.  No browser currently gets this totally right, nor per CSS spec.

2. Full Print control capabilities.  Ability to control headers and footers on page through HTML syntax.  Ability for repeat regions per printout page w/o having to wrap entire context in table tags.  This may take addititional proposals to W3C to update HTML spec.  There is no reason why HTML can include some additional print tag smarts, such as <pageHeader> and <pageFooter> tags.

3.  Separate from OS.  Yes, OS may need HTML rendering engine, but IE's DLL's should be separate from OS DLL's, not co-mingled.  The worst mistake MS ever did was the co-mingling of IE DLL's into OS DLL's.  It made deployment of IE a pain (since you were also updating OS DLL's), and it opened the OS to attack vectors based on non-OS related functions.  Firefox and other browsers work fine being external applications.  The only OS dependent feature is the TCP/IP stack (i.e., making the actual http call).  Outside of that, the rest of the app, such as rendering engine, should not be OS co-dependent.

Thanks for all the work you have done on IE.  Let's hope MS doesn't let it lag again, like it did with IE 6.0.

Hi Chris,

Hope all has gone well since @Media(London).

Just a few thoughts.  

1.  I am behind Howard 100% on the stop and refresh buttons.  Most times I forget their are even there, that is how far out of my field of vision they.   Everything should be left aligned generally speaking.  Its how we spend our time (Latin language assumption) in Word, Excel, etc.  Why retrain us?  Don't re-invent the wheel okay.

2.  I am using an RC version of 7 and find it slows the whole system when its working.  From what I have been told and lead to believe that is what TC (see two comments before me) is refering to when he/she complains about integration with OS.  This was/is a terrible error.  FF slows and I just switch to something else while I wait for it to sort itself out.

3.  "View Selected Source" from FF.  As a web designer I have found that tool so valuable its hard to say using words.  Honestly I see something that has a problem it takes me two seconds to find the code because I highlight and view.  Hugely valuable feature and its features like that that make FF a better browser to use for development.

So I am done with my suggestions but I would like to leave with a complement.  I am really happy that IE and Newsgator have partnered (directly or otherwise I don't care) to bring the sync plug-in to us.  I use IE7 purely because it syncs and the feed view is beautiful.

However there is one huge problem with your feed viewer.  I have 100s of feeds all in folders and I can't open a folder and select a feed and when I double click it opens every feed in the folder.  Gotta get that sorted guys.  

Right now surely we assume its not a big deal because most feed users are geeks right?  True (probably) but once IE7 gets released and everyone starts getting their IE6-IE7 updates, RSS will be mainstream and most will begin their migration from email newsletters/alerts to RSS.  Which means geeks won't be the only users with dozens and dozens of feeds.

Thanks Chris/IE Team on bringing us IE7 but don't let these little things slide, and if you can't find the time to sort it open the interface more so we can build plugins/extensions to enhance the features that need the effort.

Cheers,
Roger
http://www.techwinter.com

Ive come to the realization that no more bug fixes are going into IE7 before the final ship. I hate this so, but alas that is how I see it at the moment

Note that at the end of the article Mr. Thurrott says he will NOT be using IE7.

It's really quite sad that a multi-billion dollar corporation can't find the resources to develop a product comparable to one made by hobbiests.

Here's to another half-decade of broken web pages and IE hacks!  I raise my glass to you sir!