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 21st, 2007 at 8:02 am
All of you opensource lovers always blame Microsoft but the problem is that you use the stuff that is not been supported appropriately and Microsoft is one who actually made you aware of a UI.
I would say each new version will surely have bugs or minor issues and to me these are for obvious reasons. As most of the customers uses Microsoft IE why not you all decide to start thinking about using Microsoft tools to develop your sites? Or at least think about a single standard.
A product in use by 100 of 1000’s will have 100 of 1000’s customers and similar number of cries as everyone has a new thought. Opensource will never succeed unless they give good competition and results. How many of you use Linux now a days? Don’t tell me you don’t have XP at home!
March 20th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Ahhhh!
Why do Microsoft always develop BUGS!,
I found out IE6 and IE 7 has pixel problems as well,
just 1pixel difference between IE6 and IE7
March 20th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
[...] read more | digg story No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI Leave a comment Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> [...]
March 20th, 2007 at 11:47 am
[...] 2007 Enviar por e-mail (No hay votos) Loading … Interesante artículo en DevThought acerca de cómo la renovada versión de Internet Explorer (7) aún da ciertos [...]
March 20th, 2007 at 9:43 am
I can’t wait until MS releases IE 7,5, IE 8, IE 8.5 and IE 9…
I’m really really looking forward to adding some more nasty shit to my pages and creating new stylesheets every time MS decides to release another just broken product.
Couldn’t some webdevvers start a class-action suit against microsoft for saddling them up with costs they can’t charge to their clients?
March 20th, 2007 at 9:11 am
I have a site that look great in everything EXCEPT IE FREAKIN’ 7!!!
March 20th, 2007 at 8:58 am
[...] http://devthought.com/ie7-still-creating-problems-for-developers/ [...]
March 20th, 2007 at 12:13 am
I’m a project manager for a website development company, and we tell our clients NOT to use IE7, it has caused many problems which is making it more and more incompatible with ASP.NET, I have one clients website I made more accessible for Firefox and have them using that to run the program we’ve developed for them, since they are not computer literate enough to uninstall IE7 and use 6.
There are still problems with IE7 and google, yahoo and msn toolbars and popup blockers.
I will never use a microsoft product/upgrade for a minimum of a year after it has been released, and sometimes longer, and this is proof positive as to why.
March 19th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
They still haven’t fixed IE7 partially loading images if you use ITALICS on your webpage next to an image. Italics even breaks LINKS in IE7!
March 19th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
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.
March 19th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
[...] « How I Forget Mar19 IE7 Still Buggy!?! Posted by Les in Design, Tech Here is a great article pointing out the more annoying failures Microsoft has managed to keep in their [...]
March 19th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
well finally i found a place where i can shout and shout and where there is some1 shouting with me…
every time we develop a website we have to go over and have the special editing to fit IE6 and as its said in the article today IE7 so in place of fixing the problem they got us more headache to worry about and work…
why dont they do it simple and clean like Opera FF or they are special,,, dont give a f0000k about their products but let they get away from us and let us work properly.
i think the nightmare of every web developer is the browsers compatibility and all the thanks goes to IE
regards,
jean
http://www.jean.ghalo.com
March 19th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
Thanks for the link to netrenderer… very useful service! Which, of course, speaks to the fact that we *need* such a service– and that is what’s truly unfortunate. In any case, great writeup.
March 19th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
IE7 is a giant turd. You trade one set of problems in IE6 for a whole new set of problems in IE7 with no common grounds.
I don’t know what web sites MS used to test their improvement in CSS, must have been internal ones or ones already hacked for IE6.
Instead of MS fixing their browser to use standards correctly, they’re forcing every web designer to work around a whole new set of bugs. We’re actually WORSE off, as designers, with the new IE7, as we now have to support 3 browsers groups: IE6, IE7, everybody else.
March 19th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
GIFs only support transparent pixels, PNG supports alpha transparencies. A PNG can have a semitransparent pixes, whereas the semi-transparency in GIFs is merely dithering.