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 6:46 pm
For the Web, PNG really has three main advantages over GIF:
- alpha channels (variable transparency),
- cross-platform gamma correction (control of image brightness) and color correction
- two-dimensional interlacing (a method of progressive display).
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/png-gif
March 19th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
Joost guy,
because gifs dont have alpha transparency.
March 19th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
i feel ya!!!!!!! they really do make things hard for us CSS producers. the RIAA must be developing IE browsers huh? haha punks
March 19th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
[...] still creating problems for developers? Filed under: Uncategorized — recar @ 9:06 pm IE7 still creating problems for developers? This seems like a never ending story. After allegedly fixing and improving their market leading [...]
March 19th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Joost guy,
Because gifs only have 256 colors?
March 19th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
I don’t get it, why not just use gifs from the start - they work everywhere, support transparency!
March 19th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Yes, it is an evil Microsoft plot to get itself sued for more than a billion dollars just to screw with you. You’ve found them out!!!
March 19th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
@AI
I see now… yet another reason to make everyone switch Firefox then.
March 19th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Uche (hi! I know you!), Firefox isn’t being sued by Eolas because Eolas publicly stated that they weren’t going to go over open source products, only commercial ones. The patent applies to Firefox as well but Eolas isn’t going after them.
March 19th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Buen artículo, estoy haciendo una referencia en mi blog al respecto. Saludos!
March 19th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Actually, Guillermo, you’re wrong. It has nothing to do with security. It is a matter of legal compliance.
The requirement to click on a swf file is a result of the EOLAS lawsuit. In order to avoid a billion plus dollar judgement, Microsoft was required by the lawsuit to not allow things like flash to be fully interactive without user intervention. Go google “eolas lawsuit” if you want details.
Take it up with the lawyers and the idiots who started the lawsuit, not Microsoft., who were forced to change IE to comply.
Al who worked on IE until early-2006.
March 19th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Andy, if anything’s a waste of time, it’s reading about Microsoft “fixing” things for IE 7. I do web professionally and IE 7 is just as much a POS as all the other versions.
March 19th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
@Uche
I didn’t know about that, but something doesn’t seem right. They sued Microsoft to add a border before you can do anything else? And aren’t they sueing them to remove the Javascript hack?
March 19th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
For those of you who want to (read: have to) support IE6 and IE7, try out Multiple IEs, which lets you have any IE version you care about installed and running simultaneously.
March 19th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
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