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)
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:
- 43 Bugs in Internet Explorer 7
- 73 bugs from Peter Paul Koch’s Quirksmode.
- More 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:
<!--[if lte IE 6]><style type="text/css" media="all">@import "/css/17/ie6.css";</style><![endif]–><!--[if gt IE 6]><style type="text/css" media="all">@import "/css/17/ie7.css";</style><![endif]–>
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.
Tags: on March 18th, 2007
March 19th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Kevin: The reason IE puts a border around embedded media is because Eolas Technologies owns the patent on inline plugins, and they sued Microsoft to block them from using it.
Opera also exhibits this behavior. I can only guess that the reason Firefox doesn’t is because it’s open source and not owned by any one large entity (or maybe the Mozilla corporation licensed Eolas’ technology.)
March 19th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Back in November I got my hands on IE7 for the first time. I usually create sites for the rest of the browsers and then debug for IE. Because IE7 had just been released, I had already corrected all the issues for IE6. I was very surprised to find that I had to use a 2nd IE7 specific stylesheet with some hacks in addition to my IE6 stylesheet. Some bugs were duplicated accross both browsers, but some in IE7 were new, or required entirely different solutions than IE6.
It was frustrating to realize that I now had 3 major browser contingents to code for, pre-IE7, IE7, and everything else. MS had just added a good chunk to my workload. Fun.
March 19th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
@Kevin
That’s just one more absolutely ridiculous security “feature”. Just like Vista asking confirmation for everything you do.
As you mention, Firefox has always been the safest browsing alternative, and without that stupid border.
March 19th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
As far as I can tell, they haven’t fixed anything. In a way that’s a good thing as now I don’t have to figuire out a way to install IE6 with my copy of IE7.
@Bryce
Fact is, you can’t simply start ignoring IE7 users by leaving in bugs and hoping they will switch. Why? Because it’ll never happen.
You can ignore all of the older generations and less-computer-savvy people and you’ll still have a losing battle. I’m on a computer science course at a leading university and I’ve had discussions about web browsers and faced two problems.
1) People don’t like change. Even when it’s better for them.
2) People don’t understand the problem. They aren’t web developers, they haven’t experienced the torment of having to code a website to get it to work in IE, and until they do, I’m sure they’ll never learn.
Right now I like to point out how much faster my tabs open in Opera than they do in IE7 and the fact that they are persistent across browser sessions, but I think the only way is to start pre-loading PCs without IE7 and with an alternative. Which I guess means more Macs and more Linux!
March 19th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
My main beef with IE7 is that they still haven’t figured out how to adequately fix the insertion of .swf media onto their pages - like firefox has for quite some time!
Why do I have to insert a javascript fix to eliminate the border around .swf files and why do I have to click on them once in order to actually make them active (without the javascript fix)?
March 19th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
I also would. I just can’t help but wonder how come a multibillion dollar company constantly fails at creating a good browsing product for both developers and users.
March 19th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
@Bryce Fields
I would, if only that was possable, or made any sense at all. I have to make money, and if the customer wants it to work in IE (which every single one of them do) then it will work in IE. My problem right now is making it work in both IE and Safari, all my IE fixes break Safari. XD
But, whether we like it or not, we need the money, and the customer is the one that gives us that. We can’t just dump IE because the customer base won’t.
March 19th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Jesus guys, he already said he stopped using PNG’s therefore the screenshot no longer applies because he had to make his self less efficient to cling to his IE7 users.
March 19th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
Interesting article, and as we’ve encountered several IE7 bugs where I work ourselves, I agree w/ you that not much seems to really be fixed. However, I must say one thing. I would keep using the PNGs. Keep making sites that are going to look jacked in IE7 if it’s the browser’s fault for bad support. If enough of us web developers would just go ahead and do this one simple thing rather than trying to cater to a buggy browser, that more than anything would force Microsoft’s hand in truly fixing the problems in their products.
March 19th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
I think that may be a bug in the screenshot service, I’m using IE7 now and the highlight on the menu displays fine.
March 19th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
@Andy.
Check twice. I had to disable the PNGs. Check the commented lines in the CSS files.
@Al, @raveman
This blog’s language is english.
March 19th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
I checked your menu using IE7 it works. So this post is a waste of time.
March 19th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
Otro post mas que ataca a MS. Que novedad.
En serio crees que se dedican a ver como atacarte como developer con cada release?
Como recomendación, si tan importante asi es IE como para que tengas un post acerca de el, deberias probar como funciona tu website, antes de liberarlo al publico.
Pero creo que esas experiencias las aprenderas con el tiempo.
March 19th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Całkowicie się z tobą zgadzam, mam nadzieje, że zmieni się to kiedyś
czy aby na pewno trzeba już obsługiwać IE7?
March 18th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Excelente que te hayas dispuesto a averiguar el inconveniente con IE7. Felicitaciones de un compañero argentino (y).. y muy groso que tengas solo 16 años y ya hagas estas cosas muy grosas..
ahora faltaria “updetear” el tutorial del menus ^^
Felicitaciones nuevamente.. directo a mis feeds ^^