IE7 still creating problems for developers?

For the last couple of years, we developers have been struggling with IE incompatibilities while creating and testing our sites. Those include the non-native support for PNG transparencies, the box model bug, and many many more.

Thanks to the effort of many developers, documenting and gathering information about them, sometimes even providing workarounds, we’ve somehow managed to deal with them.

IE7, however, was supposed to solve all these bugs, and add those all missing features. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In this article I’ll highlight some of the new built-in annoyances.

PNG issue solved. Or not

Microsoft expert developers claimed in April 26, 2005 that “overall, transparent PNG support is looking quite solid in IE7, based on our tests“. I’ll show you now how solid it really is.

I recently published an article that went through the creation of a menu which used some 32Bit transparent pngs, and if the browser didn’t support them, it’d rely on gifs. As my personal computer is a MacBook PRO, I could only test it with Safari, Firefox, and my brother’s Internet Explorer 6. I trusted IE7 developers, and I assumed that PNG would work fine with that browser. Shortly after making it to the Digg homepage, I found out that my menu wasn’t working on IE7.

Thanks to this miraculous IE7 screenshots service, I could see myself what IE7 was showing to my visitors. (I’ve fixed this temporarily by also serving GIFs to Internet Explorer 7 after people noticing the black background, which explains why you can currently see this problem)

PNG on Safari and Internet Explorer 7

Yes, I can hear you scream. It’s not even the light blue color IE6 would display for a transparent PNGs. It’s black.

On a side note, you might have noted that the menus colors look differently.

A comment in the IEBlog suggested that setting the DPI to a value equal or higher than 120 resulted in this behavior. For the time being, I’ve resolved to switch back to transparent GIFs and curse IE7.

More CSS and rendering bugs

Although they’ve successfully fixed many bugs, it’s still quite evident that their browser is still far from perfect.

This is an interesting list of sites full of IE7 bugs:

Of course I haven’t verified all those myself, nor am I sure they have been fixed in the last release. But I’m certain that it’s not bug-free at all, not even its CSS support, as evidenced by many sites use of conditional comments to introduce IE7-specific CSS rules. Looking at Digg <head> we find an example of this:

Click here to see HTML code

What now?

If we check some browser usage stats, there’s no doubt that IE7 is already an important player. But IE6 still doubles its share, which only means that we not only have to support, struggle and deal with IE6 inefficiencies, but also with those that Microsoft has now introduced with IE7.

Maybe they’re still listening to our complaints, and IE7.5 will address these. I don’t really care about their products, but it’s still affecting the way we work. They’re seriously good at making everything harder everytime they release a new browser version. Yet another reason to encourage everyone switch.

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  1. Dominick Bellizzi over 3 years ago
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    IE7 chokes on a javascript array with more than about 8k entries. IE6 is fine, 7 gives a javascript syntax error when loading the same page.

    Splitting the array into an array of smaller arrays didn’t help either, it blew up at the same point.