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IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team!

We've released www.microsoft.com/windows/ie

It's a product that all of us are justifiably proud of.

A video of me giving a tour meeting a few of the IE team is live on Channel 9 There are a couple more videos that will be available in the coming days. I talk for far too long at the start of this video but it was great fun to lead Charles around with the Channel 9 camera.

Thanks
-Dave 

 

Published Wednesday, October 18, 2006 4:51 PM by DMassy

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Comments

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Wednesday, October 18, 2006 8:46 PM

Dave -

Just checked out the IE7 release. You guys must've done further tuning around JScript 5.7 since RC1 (I'm showing version 5730). It absolutely rocks now (as you might imagine, it was my #1 hot button issue :-).

Please extend my thank you (again and again and again!) to the individuals involved in this work (and the managers who made it a priority within Microsoft ;-) ).

Cheers,

- Bill

William J. Edney

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Wednesday, October 18, 2006 10:46 PM

Why does IE7 not support CSS 2.1 auto-generated content? There is no abilities around :before and :after pseudo tags.

Brian G.

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Wednesday, October 18, 2006 10:59 PM

Brian,

As we have stated before we did not get to generated content in this release. It is something we want to get to in a future release. In IE7 we prioritised our work to fix issues with teh IE6 implementation of CSS adn added support for selectors and fixed positioning. We know we have more work to do in this area and are looking forward to it. Generated content is a major work item but definitely something we want to get to.

Thanks

-Dave

Dave Massy

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Thursday, October 19, 2006 1:45 AM

Thanks Bill,

We've continued to work on performance. It's great to know that it is noticed and appreciated. :)

Thanks

-Dave

Dave Massy

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Thursday, October 19, 2006 4:37 AM

Congrats with the release Dave :-)

Olli

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Thursday, October 19, 2006 8:11 AM

Congrats the most expensive browser on the market for web developers who need to test and IE6 & 7. Virtual PC - free!!! New Windows license to run on the virtual PC costs $$$. Not all web devlopers have unlimited funds to spend money just to test a browser. IE7 is still the most disjointed poorly thought out UI for any app.

Mark M

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Thursday, October 19, 2006 1:46 PM

More videos from the tour are now up.

We discuss user experience at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=247016

Meet the RSS team at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=247019

There's one more to come where we talk about networking...

DMassy

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Thursday, October 19, 2006 3:25 PM

Mark, I agree fully, but you can do what I do: go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/trial/default.mspx, and order the (completely free) 180-day trial for Windows Server 2003. Then install that in VPC/VS/WMWare (whichever you prefer). It's free, you can activate it and it passes WGA, and you only have to reinstall it once every six months. :)

I don't know for certain if the EULA for the trial allows me to use it that way, but it works, and since MS doesn't give any better option to test multiple versions of IE, it'll do for me.

Sven Groot

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Thursday, October 19, 2006 7:11 PM

Well done on getting it out the door. Like your video says, there's a lot more still to do in terms of the developer platform, but it's a really significant improvement on IE6, so congratulations. Hope you have a party!

Thomas Tallyce

# IE7 renders shared ssl certs useless @ Friday, October 20, 2006 8:32 AM

Gee.. thanks so much microsoft for the big scary warning that now displays itself just before my checkout page in IE7. Since my shared cert does not match the domain of my website, but instead matches the server's domain... this scary message will effectively put an end to my small ecommerce site even though my shared cert is still safe for encrypting credit card data. I can't afford to buy a personal certificate year after year. IE6 showed a small dialog box warning- this was fine.

Way to imply that my website is evil. Thanks a lot. I'm sure the many thousands of shared cert users are going to be badly affected by this.

~Disgruntled.

Sherri

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Friday, October 20, 2006 9:05 AM

Sherri,

Moving to ensure that certs actually help with security is an important step forward adn we had many previews to allow people to prepare for this release. See the documentation regarding SSL and certificates at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/IETechCol/cols/dnexpie/ie7_https_imps.asp

As an invalid cert is a sign that there is a security issue we want to warn the user in a way that will make them take notice. That seems more than reasonable to me.

Thanks

-Dave

DMassy

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Saturday, October 21, 2006 9:00 PM

I just downloaded IE7 and can't find the button for Outlook Express. Please help!

Nikki

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Saturday, October 21, 2006 11:15 PM

Nikki,

You can add the email button to your toolbar by going to the tools dropdown and selecting toolbars and the selecting Customise.

Thanks

-Dave

DMassy

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Wednesday, October 25, 2006 8:36 AM

I'm now using IE7. Tabs are finally there. But I can not see any options to open a link in a new tab on the right-click menu. (XP/SP2) There are: Open, Open in New Window, Save targer as.. etc. Same menu as IE6.

Does Right-Click menu ignore the tabs existence? or is it a specific problem to my computer? Thank you for your comments.

Cengiz

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Wednesday, October 25, 2006 12:39 PM

Cengiz,

Some addons are known to remove the right click menu option for opening a new tab which is added in IE7. Make sure that all your extensions such as the google toolbar are up to date.

You can always middle mouse click or Ctrl+click a link to open it in a new tab.

Thanks

-Dave

DMassy

# re: IE7 Released. boy what a Stinker @ Thursday, October 26, 2006 5:41 AM

As a seasoned (8 + years) developer, I have been a total FireFox convert for the last 2 years, only using IE6 to test the extra work I have to put in to make websites render correctly in IE 6 (thanks, MS, for countless hours lost there).

I was eagerly awaiting IE 7 hoping it would put an end to this. I downloaded it yesterday. Less than 24 hours later, I am completely dissappointed.

The User Interface aspects are a JOKE. What on earth were you thinking putting the Home, Forward-Back, and Refresh buttons all in different places ? Do you know ANYTHING about the principles of HCI and UI design ? This breaks the most common rule - be consistent !  As one person wrote on another comment somewhere, using IE 7 is now a bit like playing virtual 'tennis' as your mouse moves back and forth across the screen. I couldn't have put it better !

Same applies for putting the menu bar UNDERNEATH the URL bar , this breaks ALL previous windows programs metaphors.

IE 7 has crashed more than 20 times so far, with various errors, including one that said there were 'not enough timers available' or something like that. I wish I had grabbed a screenshot. Everything else on my system is very stable, so in the absense of any other evidence, one is only left assuming the cause is IE7 itself.

Websites that I have developed and which appear to display perfectly well in Firefox, Opera, Netscape, Konqueror, Safari, and even bad old IE 6 now display incorrectly in IE 7 !!  Go figure !

There are indeed one or two good enhancements, like the Quick Tabs preview feature, which is an excellent idea. But this does not compensate for the way IE 7 now breaks the user interface experience with its quirky, non-sensical layout and standards compliance breaking bugs.

Sorry, but you have now totally lost me as an IE user. From now on I will firmly stick with FireFox et al for my web development and general useage. You had your chance... you blew it !

I am only posting this here as there seems to be a lack of other places to post feedback about IE 7 - I notice that many of the other blogs seem to have their new comments posting options  disabled... I wonder why ?   Maybe because all the criticism is now starting to flood in ??

CPS.

CPS

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Thursday, October 26, 2006 11:47 AM

If IE is crashing then you shoudl make sure that all teh extensions you are running are uptodate. There are known issues with many extensions.

I strongly suggest you take time to adapt to the new user interface. While it may not seem right at first those that take time to adapt find it difficult to go back to anything else.

For pages not displayign correctly in IE7 see the MSDN documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie As we have said amny many times during the beta cycle some pages that are relying on teh inocrrect rendering characteristics of IE6 under the strict doctype may need to change as we have addressed those issues.

The team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie has comments enabled so I'm confused why you feel you cannot leave feedback there.

Thanks

-Dave

DMassy

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Thursday, October 26, 2006 8:48 PM

Doesn't matter how much I use IE7 (I have been using since the beta release) the interface is still a poorly thought out mess. I have tried to use it for many months but it just continues to frustrate and I cannot "adapt" to such a poorly thought out interface. If I produced software with an interface like this give up being a developer.

Mark M

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Thursday, October 26, 2006 10:38 PM

Mark,

I'm not on the User Experience team (I'm on the platform part of the IE team) so I'm not going to engage in a back and forth argument on this. I will say that there are many people who disagree with you and like the new user interface design, myself included. We do recognise that customisability of the UI was lost and is something that the UE team hope to address in a future release.

Thanks

-Dave

DMassy

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Friday, October 27, 2006 1:04 AM

Dave

In the end it comes down to personal taste and if were all the same the world would be a boring place :)

On a positive note for IE 7 I will say I haven't had a crash or issue with any of the releases that I have run on my laptop and on my PC.

Regards

Mark M

Mark M

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Friday, November 03, 2006 10:16 AM

A javascript bug:

I have noticed that a bug that exists in IE6 also appears in IE7 (and opera but that's someone else's problem).

getElementById will return the first form element that has a NAME attribute equal to the id you specify, not the id as it should be.

code to demonstrate (not sure if I can post it):

[code]

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"

       "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">

<head>

<title></title>

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">

<!--

function bugit(elementID){

var targetElement = document.getElementById(elementID);

targetElement.value = "bug?";

}

//-->

</script>

</head>

<body>

<form>

form 1, input 1: <input type="text" name="test1" id="page_id2" title="" value="" maxlength="" /><br />

form 1, input 2: <input type="text" name="page_id" id="page_id3" title="" value="" maxlength="" /><br />

</form>

<form>

form 2, input 1:<input type="text" name="test1" id="test_3" title="" value="" maxlength="" /><br />

form 2, input 2:<input type="text" name="page_id" id="page_id" title="" value="" maxlength="" />

</form>

<a href="#" onclick="bugit('page_id')">Show me the buggies</a>

</body>

</html>

[/code]

Apologies if this isn't the best place to post this, but I don't want to have to sign up to windows live just to tell you about a bug.

Kris K

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Friday, November 03, 2006 11:07 AM

Kris,

That's a known issue that will break a great many pages on the web if we change. We'll certainly be looking at it again as we plan for the next release.

Thanks

-Dave

DMassy

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Tuesday, November 07, 2006 6:26 PM

Could you please provide more detail about how to fix the "not enough timers" errors.  I am encountering a lot of them.

Graham

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Tuesday, November 07, 2006 7:17 PM

Graham,

Could you please supply details of the "not enough timers" errors and when you are seeing them. I'm not familiar with this issue. Do you have any extensions to IE installed that may be causing this?

Thanks

-Dave

DMassy

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Tuesday, November 14, 2006 10:25 AM

I too am getting the "Not enough timers" alert box appearing since installing IE7 (running XP SP2). Could be the toolbars - I have the "AIS Web Accessibility Toolbar" installed. Will update now and see if this is the problem...

Nasher

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Tuesday, November 14, 2006 12:19 PM

I am also getting this error on my applications.

Nasher did it work for you ?

Dominic

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Wednesday, November 15, 2006 6:55 PM

What is the MS plan for improving the way SSL is handled for hosted websites?  Our small business uses a hosted sales site with shared SSL, we'd like our own IIS server but cannot afford it, IE7 doesn't like shared certificates...

Is there a plan to deal with this?  Like inventing a new SSL that will allow hosted sites to have their own certificate.

I won't tell you what option the sales team has come up with, but it involves a lawyer.

Justin W

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Thursday, November 16, 2006 12:38 PM

Not enough timers.  I'm getting the same message after upgrading to IE7.  Occurs frequently while IE7 is running - but no apparent pattern.  Will have 2-3 pop up in  a row, and then nothing for 10 minues or so.  I'm running XP pro - updated regularly.  

Randy

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Thursday, November 16, 2006 1:20 PM

Randy,

Do you have any extensions to IE installed? If so which ones. Do you get this if you run IE with extensions disabled?

Thanks

-Dave

DMassy

# The accessibility toolbar problem @ Thursday, November 16, 2006 2:41 PM

I have this accessibility toolbar installed on all of our pc's in the labs.  The error occurs as you mouse over the toolbar, while it is installed.  This bug is not present in all machines, which strikes me as odd since they all have the same hardware and image.  There is no upgrade provided by the maker of the toolbar, but the toolbar works. So this would more then likely be an issue with IE7 and the change in rendering or the linking of plug-ins.

carl

# re: IE7 Released. Meet a few of the team! @ Thursday, November 16, 2006 5:12 PM

carl,

Does it still ocur if you disable the accessibility toolbar? The toolbar is most likely the issue here as the addition of tabs means that some toolbars no longer work if they are relying on undocumented behavior of IE6.

Thanks

-Dave

DMassy

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