Internet Explorer 7 - more standards, less bugs?

Posted on Sunday, July 31 2005 @ 21:26 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Internet Explorer developers want to clarify some things regarding IE7:
I wanted to make it clear that we know Beta 1 makes little progress for web developers in improving our standards support, particularly in our CSS implementation. I feel badly about this, but we have been focused on how to get the most done overall for IE7, so due to our lead time for locking down beta releases and ramping up our team, we could not get a whole lot done in the platform in beta 1. However, I know this will be better in Beta 2 – and I want to share how we are placing our priorities in IE.

In the web platform team that I lead, our top priority is (and will likely always be) security – not just mechanical “fix buffer overruns” type stuff, but innovative stuff like the anti-phishing work and low-rights IE. For IE7 in particular, our next major priority is removing the biggest causes of difficulty for web developers. To that end, we’ve dug through a lot of sites detailing IE bugs that cause pain for web developers, like PositionIsEverything and Quirksmode, and categorized and investigated those issues; we’ve taken feedback from you directly (yes, we do read the responses to our blog posts) on what bugs affect you the most and what features you’d most like to see, and we’ve planned out what we can and can’t do in IE7.
Here's a list of bugs for web developers that are now fixed - although some not yet in IE7 Beta 1:
  • Peekaboo bug
  • Guillotine bug
  • Duplicate Character bug
  • Border Chaos
  • No Scroll bug
  • 3 Pixel Text Jog
  • Magic Creeping Text bug
  • Bottom Margin bug on Hover
  • Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
  • IE/Win Line-height bug
  • Double Float Margin Bug
  • Quirky Percentages in IE
  • Duplicate indent
  • Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
  • 1 px border style
  • Disappearing List-background
  • Fix width:auto
  • In addition they have added support for the following
    • HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
    • Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback
    • CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
    • CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
    • Alpha channel in PNG images
    • Fix :hover on all elements
    • Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body
    I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it’s been Recommended). I think we will make a lot of progress against that in IE7 through our goal of removing the worst painful bugs that make our platform difficult to use for web developers.
    More details at IE Blog


    About the Author

    Thomas De Maesschalck

    Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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