IE 7 beta 2 - a first test drive
Microsoft has now publicly released IE 7 Beta 2 Preview, which you can download in their IE page. It is only available for Windows XP SP 2 as of now. Naturally, your favorite blogger (yeah, you know it’s true, just admit it! ;-)) has taken it out for a short test drive.
The good
- The interface
- It has a very nice and intuitive interface. I really like the rearrangement of menus and buttons; clean and sleek.
- The zoom feature
- Without a doubt, this is the best feature of this release! I wrote about my opinion about this in Web browser vendors are also responsible for accessibility and this is exactly what I’m looking for. The combination
Ctrl + scroll wheelorCtrl + +/-now zooms a web page. - Searching in the history
- They have added a Search History feature. Seems like a great idea, but for some reason it never worked for me.
- No more almighty
selectelements - It works positioning elements on top of
selectelements so they don’t shine through. Finally! XMLHTTPRequestsupport without ActiveXXMLHTTPRequestnow works even if ActiveX controls are disabled.- Anti-aliased text.
- It looks like the text in the web browser now is automatically anti-aliased.
- Conditional comments support and consistency
-
Conditional comments are still supported and in a consistent way. You can use code like this to only include code in versions of IE prior to IE 7 (most likely CSS fixes):
<!--[if lt IE 7]> <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/ie.css" type="text/css"> <![endif]-->
The bad
- No
min-width/max-widthormin-height/max-heightsupport - This isn’t just bad but outright irritating! The incorrect handling of
widthandheightis behind many flawed layouts on the Internet, and to see that this still isn’t supported is outrageous! - Lack of support for pseudo-classes
-
Pseudo-classes like
:hover,:focus,:afterand:beforehave no support (except for, naturally,:hoveronaelements). Microsoft claim that:hovershould be supported on all CSS
elements (what the hell a CSS element is…?), but I couldn’t get it to work on any other element type. - No resizing of fonts in pixels
- Resizing fonts specified in pixels still doesn’t work. To my knowledge, the only web browser on the market that doesn’t support it.
- Incorrect event model
- It still doesn’t support the correct DOM event model for scripting.
The terrible
I found something that shocked me when I tested this web site: no content was shown but the background color. After some research and testing, I found the error. I use an element for clearing floats that looks like this:
div.clear{
clear: both;
height: 1px;
margin-top: -1px;
overflow: hidden;
}
The result of this that everything vanished! I thought that maybe it had something to do with the margin-top or overflow property, but no. It was height: 1px that threw it off so much. And the thing is, no matter what height I set the element to, it didn’t work. I had to completely remove it, and then things worked just fine. Terrible!
Running side by side with IE 6?
Since it’s possible to run IE 5 and IE 6 side by side, I was hoping that this was also applicable to IE 6 and IE 7. I also read Matt Brett’s Running IE 7 Beta 2 and IE 6 on Windows XP post, but unfortunately it didn’t work.
I also got a really interesting dialog when I was trying to get the IE 6 stand-alone version to work:
Have you tested IE 7? What are your experiences and impressions?
Related links
- What’s New in Internet Explorer 7
- Give Microsoft feedback on IE 7
- Installing and uninstalling IE 7 beta 2
Chris
