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IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

We’ve heard some great feedback on what web developers would like to see in IE7, both from the responses to my last post and from the resources I referred to.  The rest of the team was cranking away while I was away on parental leave, and I wanted to share a few details about what they were doing: The first couple of things they’ve done are:

  • Support the alpha channel in PNG images. We’ve actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the web design community that per-pixel alpha is a really important feature.
      
  • Address CSS consistency problems. Our first and most important goal with our Cascading Style Sheet support is to remove the major inconsistencies so that web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely.  For example, we have already checked in the fixes to the peekaboo and guillotine bugs documented at positioniseverything.net so use of floated elements become more consistent. 

We’re doing a lot more than this in IE7, of course, and we’re really excited that the beta release is almost here - we’re looking forward to the feedback when we release the first beta of IE7 this summer. Stay tuned for more details as we get closer to beta.

-Chris Wilson

Published Friday, April 22, 2005 6:00 PM by ieblog

Comments

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 6:11 PM by Nick Tulip
Chris,

Can't begin to tell you how much I am looking forward to this. I hope it is everything that we all hope for and maybe more. Keep it up.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 6:26 PM by CyrusN
What about tabs: http://blogs.msdn.com/cyrusn/archive/2005/04/10/406971.aspx

:)

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 6:30 PM by Dave
Fantastic! I can't wait!

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 6:37 PM by Dean Edwards
Chris - any idea when we might see the first beta?

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 6:46 PM by Jeremy
Awesome!

# Alpha PNG in IE7!

Friday, April 22, 2005 7:02 PM by K-Squared Ramblings
Web designers have clamored for it for years, since they saw what you could do with PNG images' multi-level transparency (now available in every major browser except Internet Explorer, and several minor ones). It's been speculated on for months, and r...

# Thanks

Friday, April 22, 2005 8:04 PM by Diggory Laycock
Thank-you.

Thanks for a bit of openness.

I'm very glad that PNG support is *finally* coming.

Now we just have to wait another five years so that even "old" machines will be able to render them.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 8:04 PM by Thomas Whaples
Thank God. I think I echo the sentiment of many web designers when I breathe a sigh of relief.

# IE 7 will support PNG transparency!

Friday, April 22, 2005 8:10 PM by A View From Home
Yippee! From this post on the IE blog it appears that catching up to standards will be a priority in the next version of IE! Support the alpha channel in PNG images. We’ve actually had this on our radar for...

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 8:42 PM by JD
Can there be any better news at the end of the day?? :)

Thanks guys! Keep rocking!

JD

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 8:46 PM by Maarten van Soest
Will missing CSS 2.1 properties also be added to IE7 or is the goal for IE7 to basically only remove bugs in already supported CSS properties?
I like the openness of this blog too!

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 8:48 PM by Eric Irvine
Png alpha support is definitely very cool, and with adobe buying macromedia (fireworks had great png support) it looks like it's finally time for the png! (how long was that? :P)

With style sheets its also great that you're getting rid of the annoying "just because" bugs that drive you nuts, but also things like the lack of min-height are killers when it comes to creating liquid layouts on todays enormous modern monitors, please don't forget it.

keep it up!

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 9:05 PM by sntXrrr
Thanx for finally giving some concreet info on IE7. I will still be using firefox but maybe, in 3 to 7 years, we can finally do some cool stuff on the internet without stupid workarounds and headaches.

And if I may make a feature request; please leave the "* html" css-bug intact, it's such a great hack, but do implement all css selectors on all elements. That would make life so much better.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 10:30 PM by Mike
How does IE7 handle the Acid2 test? Hopefully better than IE6.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 10:59 PM by john
Sounds great, but please please make security settings less confusing and less numerous. I want at most 5 options on the security screen, not the endless amounts of radio buttons currently that have uninformative names. It makes it extremely difficult to tell exactly how safe IE is. I especially would like ActiveX disabled by default.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 11:05 PM by Tom
"Support the alpha channel in PNG images."

"we have already checked in the fixes to the peekaboo and guillotine bugs"

Thanks and please keep more concrete statements like these coming ;)

Tom

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Friday, April 22, 2005 11:46 PM by Fuzztrek
Good to hear! I don't think there's anyone who's not excited about this next release of IE.

"Address CSS consistency problems."

I find this a little muddled - are you saying that the many, many CSS bugs IE 6 has are simply 'inconsistencies' (in which case why not just call them bugs and be done with it - that's what they are, after all) or are you saying that there are inconsistencies across browsers (no-thanks to poor standards support + bugs)?

I know it must be frustrating always having web-developers jump down your throats, but we've all fought long and hard with IE and would love to see the end of bugs, as well as this very odd picking and choosing of features out of what is supposed to be a standard.

By the time all this information is disclosed, I hope we'll be able to summerize it as "IE7 to have full CSS 2.1 support!"

Also, it would be nice to know future plans for IE - as in, will we be doing this all over again? Waiting around 5 years for any hint of upgrades to the rendering engine... How about yearly or biannually updates?

# Explosion of design

Saturday, April 23, 2005 12:01 AM by snook.ca - a collection of tips, tricks and bookmarks in web development
With the recent mention that IE7 will have proper alpha-PNG support, I predict that we will see an explosion of creativity in web site designs. I've been pondering this in some of the recent design work that I've seen come...

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 12:02 AM by Adam
you guys rock - thanks for the update!

# IE7 Details Starting to Emerge

Saturday, April 23, 2005 12:08 AM by Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET - Longhorn Edition
Chris Wilson talks IE7 details on the "official" IEBlog. In brief:

Microsoft has fixed IE's PNG support...

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 12:16 AM by Fiery Kitsune
*Awaits inevitable Slashdotting...*

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 12:31 AM by Ben Hollis
Fantastic news! The best news I've gotten in weeks, actually. One question - have you, or will you, fix the problem where margins on floated elements are doubled? That one gets me every time.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 12:35 AM by ShadowChaser
I really, really, really hope you guys are looking into JPEG 2000. It's been completely hindered due to the lack of support in IE. It's a great format!

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 12:39 AM by ShadowChaser
Whoops, one more post :-) I love the fact your addressing Alpha PNG and CSS - nice work!

Make sure you don't work around the Photoshop PNG "double alpha bug" (where photoshop saved pngs become darker). If you provide a fix for that in IE Adobe will *never* fix it and PNGs will forever remain broken :(

Someone's post here about security settings reminded me of my biggest IE pet peeve - simple "dont nag me" settings will change your security setting from "medium" to "custom"!! Clicking the "don't nag me when i submit a form" shouldn't change the security setting! :-)

It's even more aggrivating when other apps read the custom setting (ie/ baseline analyser) and tell me I'm not secure! :( Hiding UI dialog boxes has nothing to do with the security of the browser.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 1:21 AM by Gareth
Dave Hyatt's blogging of his fixes to meet the Acid2 test in Safari are generating a lot of buzz. If you want Web Developers to get excited about IE again, you should be doing something similar.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/

IE is perceived as the new Netscape 4 - a drag on web development that is too widely deployed to ignore.

Blogging progress like this would be a great way to counteract that impression before IE7's launch.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 2:14 AM by Anonymous
Off-topic: I think the IE team deserves a big round of applause. Not for IE 7, but for being open and for listening to all feedback (most of it negative and in a very aggressive tone). This came to my mind while reading the comments to the last few posts and comparing them to the comments readers used to post when this blog appeared. I'm sure IE 7 will be fine on the technical side, but it's fantastic that the team is so open to conversation with outside rant providers :)

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 2:39 AM by Zach
Funny thing is, PNG support will do more for Microsofts efforts to get people to upgrade than everything else combined.

Its a visual, in your face, reason to upgrade - and thats all people need, a belief that someone else is getting something better than they are.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 2:39 AM by on
It's great! Will you also post screenshots in the near future?

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 3:22 AM by Dave
And here is the link to the test just in case you can't find it:

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html

Wouldn't it be great if Microsoft could say they pass the test 100%. I bet a load of developers would have a lot more faith in MS.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 3:43 AM by Sriram
I tried submitting this to Slashdot but got rejected. Hopefully, this means that someone has submitted it before me - and not that Slashdot does not want to hear good things about IE

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 4:14 AM by Tom Raftery
As others have asked - how well does IE 7 handle the Acid 2 test?

It would be nice to have an answer to this.

Thanks,

Tom

# IE 7 Beta 1

Saturday, April 23, 2005 4:26 AM by Virtuelvis
The MSIE team writes about IE7 Beta 1, and some of the fixes it will include

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 4:30 AM by FlorentG
Thank you Microsoft :)

Now that you've corrected some nasty *bugs*. What about the other parts of the CSS2.1 recommandation ? I'm waiting for an another post on this blog :D

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 4:35 AM by brent
I'm very happy to see IE7's development covering some of the major issues. This will be a great browser.

I've always found the IE dhtml rendering speed to be superior for my content (which is standards compliant). Now the addition of these bug fixes and feature enhancements will ensure that IE7 users have a browser that is as cutting edge as any of the alternatives.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 4:40 AM by Shetil
I am glad that IE7 will have png alpha channel support and CSS fixes. This is several good steps in the right direction.

The problem is that IE7 will only be available to a subset of all Windows users and it will take a very long time before the majority of users will have a browser with proper CSS and PNG support.

I think that Microsoft have mistreated their customers by abandoing IE for years. People that calls this "fantastic" needs to open their eyes. Their reaction is like applauding a student for delivering a paper several years too late.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 4:46 AM by yet another web designer
Thanks guys :)

(now we can get a head start on bugging you about CSS3. border-image, here I come!)

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 5:10 AM by perspective
PNG alpha support is very nice. Sorting out the CSS bugs is essential.

Please, please, please keep in mind that securing a compliant functionality is of far more importance than what designers can do with transparency. I think most feel that the bullet points in the initial post should have been reversed, although both are obviously appreciated.

# Now that's more like it!

Saturday, April 23, 2005 5:16 AM by Brian Sexton
It is nice to have some specific information about your progress for a change. Keep the changes and the reports coming.

I will not bother with a list of suggestions for you to address next since you are doubtless aware of many issues already, but just in case I never mentioned this one specific item to you before, I would very much like to see bookmarks with titles that are not dependent upon the underlying file system (i.e. unable to use characters that are special to the file system).

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 5:34 AM by Freddie
I am glad to hear about the fixes that are comming along, however I still see one problem. Normally, I only code for the newest versions of browsers as if you are out of date then it is kind of your own fault if the site does not look correct. However, if IE 7 is only going to work on XP+ then I will still have to leave in some of my nasty browser correction code for those that do not use IE 7...

# PNG transparency, wow, imagine that.

Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:27 AM by Androse Rosewood
PNG transparency support. It makes me think of those ads Apple released when Windows95 came out saying "Now with more than 8 characters long filename : *wow, imagine that*".

Guys, you're fighting an uphill battle. Good luck !

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:44 AM by rjw
Very good! PNG alpha is a real pain at the moment. My top wishes would be:
* position:fixed
* generated content

Hope you can get to those...

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:52 AM by Chet
Here's a random request: Don't display tooltips for ALT attributes in images. That should be for TITLE attributes. Since the validator requires that ALT attributes be applied to images, all my images have them. As a result, every little bullet gives a tooltip to the IE user.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:55 AM by Julia Ault
Definitely good news for developers. I am of course, hopeful that more CSS/Standards Compliance fixes are being planned, too.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:27 AM by vdboor
> Address CSS consistency problems.

This is great news. There is one thing I'm wondering about, will you provide some option for CSS developers to ensure backwards compatibility?

CSS sites often use hacks in their code to make the site work in IE 5, 5.5, 6.0 (all behave differently) So my question is, do you have some feature planned to CSS developers can distinguish between IE6-"hack" and IE7-"proper" mode?

e.g. Something simular like the infamous "* html .. { }" or "height /**/: " tricks.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:32 AM by Firefox
After 7 years of flaming, cursing, moaning and petitioning, now only MS supports PNG alpha? ROFLMAO. And only on XP SP2, 2k3 SP1 and XP64, Win2k users are shafted and given the raw deal as usual.

Firefox still is the better web browser.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:48 AM by Jose Clocksmith
I'm very glad to hear that you're finally going to add some of the features that have been in dozens of other browsers for years.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:03 AM by Chris H
Nice work.

Though regarding CSS fixes, I'm sure you know that developers will still need to support IE 6 and for a while, especially for OS's which aren't getting IE7, meaning current hacks will still need to appear within the style sheet. Have you got any thoughts on how you think IE 7 could handle viewing CSS which IE 6 and below cannot, and vice versa?

Also, with the BETA's, will these be identified clearly as such within the IE conditional comments?

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:32 AM by François
Just one more enthusiastic comment. I'm really glad to learn that you are working on the CSS bugs.

# IE7 Team Is ... Listening?

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:47 AM by basement.org
A promising post on the IE Blog hints at some of the features (or “fixes,” depending on your point of view) to expect in IE7. It looks like some of the CSS inconsistencies are going to be addressed, along with...

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:51 AM by skyeyes
If IE7 is released after W3C releases the CSS3 guidelines, is there any chance that spec will be supported? Or will we have to wait another few years before IE catches up again?

I'm not being sarcastic, just weary. Hoping against hope.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 9:02 AM by Randy Charles Morin
Very cool!

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:03 AM by James
I hope we will see a robust download manager included that keeps a history of downloads, allows downloads to be paused and resumed, etc. I'm looking forward to these enhancements to IE 7, as I remain an IE user for speed and "pages just working" unlike much of the competition. However, I do seek greater functionality, so I use shells like Maxthon and Avant over top IE.

Thanks MS.

# Title bug on this post

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:04 AM by Maurits
Anyone else on IE 6 seeing the dash - and the ellipsis ... in the <title> of this post as unreadable characters?

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:35 AM by Block Sheep
Are you going to finish the implementation of HTML to INCLUDE ALL THE ELEMENTS from the W3 recommendation (including the Q element) ????????

It was written in 1999 -- don't you think it's about time to support HTML ???


** HTML -- the new killer web feature **

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:44 AM by Silence
"and "pages just working" unlike much of the competition."
It's not the competition fault that the IE team distributed a faulty browser.

I don't see myself returning to IE7 but I do salute a new version of IE if that means less time fooling around IE bugs and more time for doing design work!

Will this also mean that finally you will fix your broken box model?

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:45 AM by Shining Arcanine
Chris, would it be possible get IE to render this test properly:

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html

It messes it up pretty badly. Firefox makes a few mistakes too through. If you can get IE to render it properly, IE will have surpassed Firefox in at least one area of CSS.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:59 AM by Shining Arcanine
By the way, there is a guide that you can read if you need help figuring out what is wrong:

http://webstandards.org/act/acid2/guide.html

# IE 7 To Support PNG Alpha Channels

Saturday, April 23, 2005 11:05 AM by Hacking for Christ
No, not this one, this one. We’ve actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the web design community that per-pixel alpha is a really important feature. I commend Microsoft for listening to their customers, and hope they will continue to do so when they hear calls for full CSS 2.1 support. :-)...

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 11:11 AM by Shining Arcanine
Another thing:

Your competition is right now working on fixing their bugs in the Acid 2 test:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005_04.html#007932

Please fix yours.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 11:40 AM by Andre
I can't wait! Just want to know, this will be a public beta, right?

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 11:56 AM by Cody
Mozilla Firefox already does this. So what's the news?

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 12:10 PM by Fuzztrek
Yeah, when WaSP explicitly says "Although Acid2 was inspired by Microsoft's announcement of IE7, it is not targeted at a specific browser." I think it would be pretty rude for the IE team to ignore it all together ;)

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 12:20 PM by ikari
Will all the CSS problems/features described at http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/ work without any additional code? Without those scripts, precisely? If yes, IE7 is the best progress ever made in IE... By the way. Take a look at FireFox's speed. It's amazingly fast and that's its argument. What about IE7?

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 12:56 PM by Fiery Kitsune
According to the front-runner in the race to become Acid2 compliant, Dave Hyatt, the developer of the Safari browser, has noticed that the Acid2 test has been updated...

On a related note, Safari will be the first browser to pass Acid2 if he keeps up the pace.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 1:10 PM by putty
i'm sorry about most of the comments made on your post, i honestly don't know where all these prepubescent inbreds come from.

oh and add native js object access/prototyping support!

ala http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/ieemu/js.html

HTMLTextAreaElement.prototype.changeFont = function( newFont ) {
// :D :D :D
}

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 1:15 PM by Big John
PNG is great for imaging, but the main thing IE lacks as far as layout features is true fixed positioning. Any chance we will be seeing this? As long as it remains unavailable, frames will be with us.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 1:28 PM by cybarber
Just for those who didn't know.
Besides the alphaimageloader filter there is already an easy way to have PNG Alpha expressed in IE6:

Use a VML container!
Above URL has examples.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 1:40 PM by marcoos
Could you add support for W3C DOM Events? Or at least, the addEventListner() method from DOM Events? You already have most of the code ready for this, since attachEvent() is nearly the same...

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 3:13 PM by Snuffkin
Please tell me you've fixed this bug (Tableless, CSS, divs, <dl> for the list:)
IE: http://img260.echo.cx/img260/2184/ierenderbug19qu.png
Correct (Gecko): http://img245.echo.cx/img245/8337/ierenderbug24ac.png

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 4:38 PM by Pimp Juice
I'm glad to see progress is being made on the new browser. Keep up the good work!

Some things I would love to see in IE7 are:

1. Tabs. FireFox and Mozilla have these and they work beautifully.

2. Skins

3. Better security.

Can you8 guys comment on any of these? Especially tabs.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 4:47 PM by Tim G
Chris,

Thanks for the update. It is encouraging.

I concur with others' comments about the need for proper support for fixed positioning (not least background-attachment, but also position: fixed). I'm gung-ho for .png, but it wasn't number 1 on my list.

The other thing that I think is very crucial to address is IE's atrocious rendering of negative numbers, particularly negative margins. If we could get that fixed, it would open up a lot of heretofore closed doors in CSS-P.

Thanks for the post.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 5:29 PM by seb
I hope IE7 is going to be an acceptable browser, as opposed to IE6 which has been unacceptable for years now.
I wish MS would realize that bundling the browser in the OS (and thus forcing its predominance) does not allow their browser to be the worst browser in the market (behind Safari, Opera, FireFox and Netscape) both in terms of features, and in terms of CSS support.

# Just focus on CSS, XHTML

Saturday, April 23, 2005 5:56 PM by Siggy
I don't actually see the point of people here demanding a tabbed interface: if you really that, use a browser that has it already.

The MAJOR problem is with users who don't know or care about the other browsers with better support of specifications such as CSS and XHTML. Because MSIE currently lets us down in this regard, yet has a major market share, the development of websites becomes very complicated, frustrating and costly as you try to wrangle an acceptable functionality and appearance with multiple browsers. I urge MS to focus primarily on supporting CSS and XHTML according to the W3C specifications so that the development of websites becomes a much easier process. If, as you have made obvious in the past, that you are not happy with the spec, then consider carefully about how you deviate from it--asking in open discussions and participating with the W3C to voice issues is much better than simply releasing a browser with random items of the spec omitting, altered, broken or extended.

Finally, if IE7 does indeed evolve to be a far superior browser, then we need your assistance in migrating the market share from v6 to v7 is quickly as possible; the benefit of having new features, or bugs resolved, is quite undone if the transition from IE6 and IE7 is slow and having to support both becomes another complication to designing sites.


(XHTML: one major requqest is allowing the xml prolog and http header AND retaining compliant rendering mode)

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:27 PM by frederick
wait one minute why are we using microsoft crap when Firefox is already out? confused ^-^

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:28 PM by Tino Zijdel
As for the CSS bug fixes: do you just force 'hasLayout' in those situations, or is it more than just a workaround in your codebase?
I, like Dean Edwards, just have the feeling that patching up the 'ol Trident engine will simply not cut it in the long run (that is if you ever plan on supporting current standards).

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:37 PM by Eric
A lot of people are talking about how now IE will catch up with webstandards.

Web standards are a moving target. By supporting PNG fully now, you are hitting a target that everyone else achieved before you even released IE 5.0.

It is my opinion, that microsoft is single handedly responsible for making the entire WWW full of the garbage that it is full of.

Thanks! Those of us who have to wade through all the tripe that "works in IE", you've made our lives a living Hell.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:37 PM by Louis C.
If you guys don't *FULLY* support XML and XHTML (including the upcoming XHTML2) I will go crazy, seriously, because I can't wait for XHTML2 to come out and for browsers to start supporting it, because it looks wicked awesome.

# How about cross-platform support

Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:39 PM by rm
How about cross-platform support.

We have customers (government agencies and academic customers) with various unixes (at least Solaris and Linux); and we really don't want to have to support different browsers. That basically leaves us with FireFox as our only option; though most of our Windows users would certainly prefer to stay with IE.

Any chance you can release Linux and Solaris versions of IE7?

# Finally...

Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:40 PM by Happy Browser
Nice for everyone who still uses IE. Two excuses less to not use it. But still a long way to go to be any competition to the fastest and safest browser. Good job anyway! Keep it up!

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:47 PM by Tupper
Please also don't forget to remove support for non-standard CSS stuff like the scrollbar colrs... I've had so many people tell me that they knew that older versions of IE were bad for their computer's health, but wouldn't switch because their websites wouldn't show nonstandard stuff in a standardized browser.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:50 PM by Mr M
Just a quick thing about PNG support, have you also fixed the problem where PNGs aren't coming out with the right gamma settings? They always seemed a bit dark when compared with JPEGs of the same image.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:51 PM by Paul
It's going to be interesting to see if IE7 will be better than other browsers!

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:05 PM by timecop
Please, please please tell me you are NOT adding any kind of "tabbed browsing" to IE7.

Years of consistent user interface research don't need to be flushed down the toilet because of a couple whiners using inferior opensource browsers. Microsoft/IE team, don't give in to the stupidity! SDI forever.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:05 PM by Fiery Kitsune
SLASHDOTTING IMMINENT!!!!

http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/05/04/23/2053232.shtml?tid=113&tid=95&tid=1&tid=8

# IE 7 + PNG / CSS Support coming...

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:07 PM by Juiced Thoughts
Well, after reading this IE 7 report over at the IEBlog, it appears the new IE 7 is already having proper PNG support as well as working on fixing the peekaboo bug and the guillotine bug. About time! The PNG...

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:09 PM by hikari
Those bug fixes are certainly going to make life a lot easier. I'm looking forward to the day I can finally stop using the IE7 JavaScripts to make things work properly under IE; not least because they don't work in appear to work in the 64-bit version of IE.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:10 PM by Fiery Kitsune
BRACE FOR IMPACT!

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:10 PM by jug
"How does IE7 handle the Acid2 test? Hopefully better than IE6.

Mike"

LOL, well, anything else would be disastrous for the web community.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:11 PM by Chris
Look into fixing problems with persistent connections dieing, then future requests not loading properly.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:11 PM by David Blouin
When will we see a donwload manager ?

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:21 PM by Tuxedo Jack
Is there any possible way that IE could possibly be divorced from the OS itself and be a separate, installable package on its own? While it is nice to have a web browser installed with the OS, personally, I'd rather not have it deal with the shell or the system at all - or even better, how about making it non-executable when the user has root priviliges except for Windows Update? That would stop a LOT of security problems.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:23 PM by Richard M
I'd strongly advise you to get your coders including full CSS 2.1 support otherwise you'll be left for dead by Firefox.

I'd love to see Firefox overtake IE as the market leader but I'd much prefer to be able to code to standards and see my HTML/CSS displayed as intended in *every* browser.

It really can't be too much too ask, MS has wasted so much of my precious development time when I'm fixing stupid rendering bugs - it makes me so annoyed. :(

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:25 PM by ptlis
Something i'd personally really appreciate in addition to the above mentioned improvements would be to allow us to use the :hover, :active etc psuedo-classes as well as complex selectors such as p+p and perhaps stuff like input[type=submit] (I would imagine these would be amongst the least time-consuming fixes that could be made in terms of how much benefit the website development community would get from it).

Thanks,
ptlis

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:31 PM by Kirtis
well im definatly exited that IE7 will finally have proper PNG suport! I know a lot of creativaty in how web sites look will come from just that alone. As well as the css fixes.

...and if IE7 did have tabbed browsing...then kudos do you. One of my biggest pet-pieves is opening a new page in a new window every time. and i know most of us do like to have 4+ pages going at the same time. ^_^

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:38 PM by anonymous
http://www.cgisecurity.com security news

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:42 PM by Anonymous
PNG alpha support is great, but if it's been in the code base for so long, why was it kept out of SP2?

As a web developer, I think it's great that specific layout bugs are getting fixed, but the ones you mention are minor. How about fixing the box model all at once instead of making piecemeal fixes?

What about improvements to the shoddy event support?

Can we get XMLHTTPRequest changed to not use ActiveX?

IE will never be as secure as other browsers while ActiveX is supported and it is "part of the operating system", so I personally could care less about IE's security improvements. I never use IE unless I have to figure out why my markup and/or javascript doesn't work.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 7:58 PM by Sven
Support for the "data" URL scheme as described in http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2397.txt would be really great - especially if you're doing HTTPS stuff it can take quite some load from the servers by reducing the number of requests.

If IE7 would include this feature, it could actually be used in real-life applications.

# About Frickin time

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:04 PM by nyquil.org
According to IEBlog, IE7 actually supports alpha channel transparency in PNG images.

Good to hear, but what took so long? PNG transparency has been around for years and years and is so much better than GIF transparency.

Welcome to the Modern Browser

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:08 PM by Green Gecko
"Just a quick thing about PNG support, have you also fixed the problem where PNGs aren't coming out with the right gamma settings? They always seemed a bit dark when compared with JPEGs of the same image."

^ This particularly pisses me off. My site (www.thegreengecko.co.uk) sees this problem, and it is 100% W3C compliant in absolutely every way with not one exception. I'm getting tired of having to use the PHP browser definition trick all over my site. Fix it please.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:11 PM by Todd
In addition to CSS fixes, a key problem for us is having floating DIVs that hide underneath SELECTs. This makes it a total pain in the butt to have popup information windows. Yeah, I know, you can put the DIV on an IFRAME to make it visible, but this is totally stupid.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:18 PM by Johannes Axner
Please, PLEASE make the browser more standards compliant! Developing for standards compliant browsers is never a problem for me, the bottleneck allways is IE and it's lackluster support for standards.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:26 PM by tgraupmann
IE needs an anonymous browsing feature (IP HTTP spoofing/rerouting) where no one can trace your browsing habits. This applies to banking and other activies concerning privacy.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:28 PM by Ramesh
Well i am very happy to see IE7 building.As an end user i would like to give some suggestion what i am expecting from IE7. I have come to know that IE7 will be having tabbed support. Well thats a good thing. I would also like to see a find as you type feature as it is alredy there is firefox(as i have used it and not sure about others). One feature i havent seen in any Browser which is built in is Spell check/ Thesaurus as in word. It would be easy to lookup a meaning for a word which is shown in the page.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:34 PM by B van Go!
I don't see why everyone is excited; EVERY feature that is being attempted here is simply to copy existing browsers.

*Sigh* I cannot believe have I wasted my time reading this entry.

# Search does not search comments?

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:37 PM by Eustace Tilley
Is there a reason why the Search box on the upper finds no instances of the strings "acid" or "acid2"? Does the Search ignore comments?

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:42 PM by Andrew
>Any chance you can release Linux and Solaris versions of IE7?

And please add Windows 95 and 98... and if not already planned Windows 2000.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 8:44 PM by Ricardo B&#225;nffy
Can I still make a feature request? Aim for CSS 3.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 9:15 PM by Goten Xiao
How about sorting out images so that they render with the correct colours? A full 8 RGB values off actual is not conducive to clean, seamless page design...

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 9:16 PM by ...
so you're not making it good? You're just making it _less_ crappy? yay?

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 9:32 PM by XeoMage
It's already been mentioned, but I want to underscore that position:fixed would be very nice.

Thanks for the opportunity to be heard, and the feedback on progress!

# A nice Download manager

Saturday, April 23, 2005 9:36 PM by Niraj
One thing that IE still lacks is a good download manager, We really need a download manager that can pause downloads and start again, all the people in the world don't have blazing fast connection, so a download manager would be a great thing to add.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 9:40 PM by Robvdl
How about the IE PNG gamma problem, is anything being done about that? Is anybody actually aware about this problem??

On the PC, all PNG images are shown too dark in IE compared to all other browsers and other PNG enabled programs, IE is the only program that shows PNG's too dark, which is annoying if using them against a solid coloured background.

Personally, I have to strip the gamma field out of the PNG files with special software, to make the images compatible with IE, but shouldn't have to do this if the images weren't shown too dark.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 9:41 PM by Mike
>> Thank God. I think I echo the sentiment of many web designers when I breathe a sigh of relief

I don't know. I'm still concerned.

While they mention fixing consitency problems and providing functionality upon which we can "rely", there is no mention of standards being used to address the problems.

MS is notorious for defining their own standards and expecting everyone else in the world to drop what they are doing and follow them. MS treats software and features like a weapon.

Embrace, extend and and extinguish...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace_and_extend

While I hope this isn't going to be the case, I don't expect it to be any different.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 9:44 PM by Anonymous
I love how when a blog posting here is "Slashdotted" the maturity level of the comments immediately drops to the 1st grade level.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 9:49 PM by Ravi
Why can't microsoft bring out a browser like firefox or opera. I think the trick in getting out of this bad reputation for IE is to design better security for the browser - and for that microsoft has to delink the browser from the operating system.
Also there is no harm in including features that other browsers have implemented and which have been well recieved. Like tabbed browsing for instance.
Just my two bits.
--
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:04 PM by rob T
welcome to 1998! i'm glad you decided to join the party!

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:08 PM by Rowan
"Don't display tooltips for ALT attributes in images. That should be for TITLE attributes. Since the validator requires that ALT attributes be applied to images, all my images have them. As a result, every little bullet gives a tooltip to the IE user."

I completely agree, I hate seeing those little boxes show up all over the place when they shouldn't. At least make it an option to turn off, please.

Alt tags are there to display when you CAN'T see the images.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:09 PM by Vincent
IE sucks. I've been using firefox since a year and havent looked back.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:10 PM by GoodBytes
PNG alpha and CSS improvements are fine. I'd like to see full compliance with the CSS 2.1 standard, as well as tabbed browsing. Any chance that we see something like the EXTENSIONS on Firefox? Good luck with your work.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:11 PM by Ernst
Will max-width be supported? That is the only item that stops me from using fluid design. So much talk about fluid vs. fix width design. If I use fluid design the site often does not look good on a large monitor. Imagine having a fluid design that also looks good on a large monitor due to support for max-width. That would be great.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:16 PM by yawn
*yawn*

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:22 PM by AU
Please also implement proper XHTML support by
1. Not enter quirks mode when using <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> in the XHTML1.0/1.1 doctype. That would be a big support for recommended w3c doctpyes.
2. Allow adding style sheets like this <?xml-stylesheet href="style.css" type="text/css"?>
3. Add the mimetype application/xhtml+xml so that IE can properly use XHTML pages. Also allow .xht and .xhtml extensions

# CSS Support

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:27 PM by Brett
I keep hearing about IE7 not fully supporting the CSS standard because Microsoft does not agree with it. Frankly, no ones cares if you agree with it or not, stop being childish and just do your job. I can't begin to calculate how many hours I've wasted trying to get around bugs in IE, I'm sure it's well into the hundreds. It is your job to create a browser that is compliant with standards, if you can't do your job, you should be replaced.

# WOW THIS IS AWESOME

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:39 PM by bill
Wake me when you idiots can come up with a SINGLE innovative idea of your own, instead of fixing bugs from 2001 and adhering to standards that have been around SINCE THE LAST MILLENIA.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:40 PM by Ryan
Can you guys make IE7 have full CSS 2.1 support?

# to: &quot;WOW THIS IS AWESOME @ Saturday, April 23, 2005 10:39 PM &quot;

Saturday, April 23, 2005 11:08 PM by MS
If I asked YOU to wake ME when YOU were one billionth as successful as Microsoft, then they'd I'd be sleeping for the rest of my life.

Take a hike.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 11:16 PM by Mike
Will the select tag be rendered as a html object or still a windowed object. I'm tired of using iframe hacks to cover or hiding them all together. Also, maybe give the ability to style the dropdown window.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 11:32 PM by Jonas Smithson
I don't understand what all the Web developers here are so happy about. Remember that the public isn't going to run out and upgrade their browsers just because we want them to -- IE6 is going to be with us for *years* to come. All these (admittedly good) bugfixes mean is that we have yet one more browser we have to support; one more browser with its own quirks to complicate our testing.

It would help somewhat if Microsoft released a version of IE7 for earlier versions of Windows -- at least for Win2k -- at least then we could *try* to get people to upgrade; but last I heard MS's plan was to release it for XP only. Most people never upgrade the OS on a given computer, and they're not going to run out and buy a new box with XP on it (much as MS would like them to) just to get a new browser with better CSS and PNG support (which they never even heard of).

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Saturday, April 23, 2005 11:53 PM by CHL
Any chance to make <input type="file"> stylable?

# Geek PR

Saturday, April 23, 2005 11:54 PM by Morgan Doocy
Just wanted to comment briefly on the PR wording of this post.

As you well know, members of the web community have a lot of animosity toward IE for its bugs and standards compliance issues.

Using terms like "inconsistencies" to refer to issues that are quite clearly bugs doesn't put frustrated people on the IE team's side: geeks see right through PR-speak, and any attempt to smooth over their long-standing frustration generates feelings that are far less positive than using appropriate candor would.

So I think you'd be able to generate much more positive buzz for your hard work on IE7 amongst the web developer community by not attempting to neutralize your words when referring to IE's well-known shortcomings.

In other words, I think this is a case where good PR means crafting words more boldly and frankly than you would for a less specialized audience. As one of those frustrated developers, I would like to feel the IE7 buzz, but it'll take less sugar-coating for me to get on board.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Sunday, April 24, 2005 12:01 AM by syrpl
Is it at all possible that the next version of IE will support natively SVG?

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Sunday, April 24, 2005 12:17 AM by ben rich
wow! that brings you up to about 2003, right? you guys are just the tops - glad I don't have to go out and try and get things fixed with third-party solutions when I can just wait for you people to get your shit together. start up a blog in which the jaw-droppingly obvious is spelt out to you in user comments? now that's Open Source Community Building.

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…

Sunday, April 24, 2005 12:19 AM by guru
I volunteer my site for 64-bit beta testing. I have 10,000 ravenous 64-bit users chomping at the bit for this. Please tell that there will be a simultaneous launch for the 64-bit platform! I do not wish to be boiled in oil...

# re: IE7 beta 1 – A few details…