Internet Explorer 7

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Internet Explorer 7

Details of the changes

IE 7 has been out for quite a while, and I have to say, from a developer's point of view; big disappointment. There are a few CSS changes; mostly long overdue bug fixes, and a few token extra parts of the CSS standard, just to try to make it look like they are not too far out of the game.

The upgrade concentrates almost entirely on the user interface:

It now has tabs. Good news, but big deal. Opera has had an MDI since Opera 1. Netcaptor (a third party IE interface) introduced tabs, and Opera added them in Opera 4. Mozilla, Safari, Firefox, Konqueror, iCab and OmniWeb have all since added tabs. Avant, Maxthon, and many other IE skins also have tabs. IE is just catching up. It is nice to see them natively supported, but it is nothing to get too excited over any more, it is just something that users expect from a browser.

It has a new anti-phishing feature. Basically, it sends the URLs that you visit to Microsoft, so they can tell you if they are known phishing sites. Other browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari) are also adopting this approach. This sort of Big Brother approach may be good for some, but I value my privacy. It also looks for possible signs of phishing on the page. It might possibly generate a few false positives, but overall, it seems similar to the idea of scanning your emails for spam. Maybe it is a nice idea.

It has put the menus in a very strange position, under the toolbars, and they are hidden by default (until you press Alt). This seems to be inline with the UI of Vista, so maybe it is a sign of things to come. Excuse me if I do not jump on it as a fantastic innovation though, and it really would be nice if it fitted in with XP when it was running on XP. You can use a registry tweak to put it back where it belongs, and right click on the toolbars to tell it to always show the menu bar.

There are a few other feature changes too, but that is not the main reason we are here. We are here to talk about web development. Standards support. I put it through my article, and a few other tests to see if some extra standards support has been added. Note that most of these changes (even things like the additional selectors) will only take affect if your page uses a doctype declaration that triggers IE 7's strict mode:

And bugs that have been fixed:

And other changes have been made:

OK, there has been some progress at last. It has taken 4 years, but at least there is some progress. It certainly is not enough though. Their DOM and scripting support has remained static, and still badly limited compared with the other browsers. CSS support is slightly better, but when you consider what the other browsers have achived in the same time, IE 7 is still a futile attempt to stop losing market share. It is not an attempt to bring the browser up to date.

Acid2 has changed. IE 6 was about level with Opera 3.6. IE 7 has now got to about Opera 4 or maybe 5. Generated content, display:table, and data URIs would make a big difference (and would be immensely helpful for many of us), but the layout improvements are as complete as they are going to be. IE 7 is still not even remotely as good as the other browsers, and it will continue to hold back the Web. In addition, they are not releasing it for most of their operating systems, so millions of IE 6 installs will remain, and will still need to be catered for. Keep up the good work Dean Edwards, looks like we are still going to be needing you.

On the positive side, the JavaScript engine is about twice as fast as in IE 6, so it is still a little slower than Firefox's, and still much slower than Opera's.

This is a short article, but that is quite appropriate, because the list of IE 7 fixes is also sadly lacking. The future with IE 7 is looking just as stale as with IE 6. IE users, please do web developers a favour. Change to a better browser.

Running IE 6 and IE 7 on the same computer

Older versions of IE can be run on the same computer as an IE 7 install by using the downloadable zip archive. Unpack the archive into an empty folder, and run iexplore.exe from that folder. (Note that you can also use this approach to run earlier versions on the same computer as an IE 6 install, but notes here are given for IE 7 installs only.)

There are some limitations to this approach. All versions will think they are IE7 when you use conditional comments, so fixes applied with conditional comments may not seem to work. Some of the packaged versions cannot use their address bars, and you have to use file-open. Using offline mode may cause different installs to stop working completely. Some versions have trouble displaying alert, confirm, and prompt dialogs. They may also fail to use cookies or DirectX/filters as well. In some versions (4, 5), iframes do not work. Print preview and printing may also fail.

An alternative is to use the TredoSoft installer, which can install multiple IE versions (3, 4, 5, 5.5, 6) for you, and fixes the conditional comments, alert, confirm, prompt, cookies, and filters. The TredoSoft installer is designed for use with Windows XP SP 2, with IE 7 installed. The remaining known problems with the IE versions installed by the TredoSoft installer are:

For those of you who use a non-Windows operating system (specifically Unix or Linux, but the same could apply with - for example - Virtual PC for Mac), Mark Gibbens has suggested a few solutions.

This site was created by Mark "Tarquin" Wilton-Jones.
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