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
December 23rd, 2007 at 8:47 am
[...] successfully added support for the alpha channel in PNG images. Wait… Oh crap, looks like we found a problem! Do you need more examples? Okay, just tell me how many of them do you need to have a critical [...]
December 21st, 2007 at 4:37 pm
I hate IE. IE7 is better, but still renders things different than Firefox, though most web users are still slave to IE, I tolerate IE.
December 16th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
[...] (more…) [...]
December 16th, 2007 at 8:44 am
nice blog…
i like both ie7 and firefox and use them alternately….
greetz
legatory
December 12th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
I can’t stand IE. Always messing up my designs, especially with older versions, and anything with png. I wish the world would migrate to better browsers (Firefox, and such), or at least upgrade to newer versions. Good post.
December 10th, 2007 at 7:44 am
[...] IE7 still creating problems for developers? For the last couple of years, we developers have been struggling with IE incompatibilities while [...]
December 5th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
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November 20th, 2007 at 9:26 am
[...] read more | digg story [...]
October 11th, 2007 at 9:04 am
[...] read more | digg story [...]
September 11th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
i started dev with 4.x IE/NN, since then there are allways the same issues, compatibility and version problems.
http://www.nomoreiehacks.org/
this is the answer i’ll take for my personal sites.
The commercial sites could change, too. I was in at least in two global players wich have strictly use of NN/FF.
I’m not completly hopeless that some day ms will take us developers seriously.
August 15th, 2007 at 5:41 am
thank you
July 15th, 2007 at 5:01 am
[...] Guillermo Rauch has an excellent article ripping in to the fact that Microsoft promised Internet Explorer 7 would fall in-line with the expectations of digital designers, but has instead done little more than create new problems for us: 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. [...]
July 5th, 2007 at 1:22 am
Hello
Great book. I just want to say what a fantastic thing you are doing! Good luck!
G’night
June 19th, 2007 at 5:30 am
Hi,
thanks for the GIF workaround… hopin’ that there will be more complex workarounds for IE in the future…
May 11th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
One weird issue I’ve just encounted with IE7 is that entire sections of some of my pages mysteriously disappear when I hover my mouse over a text link utilizing a title attribute.
Yet on the other pages (not experienceing the issue), the code for the text links include the exact same title attributes.
The only workaround I’ve found is to remove the title attributes from the source code on the affected pages. (Which I hate to do for consistency’s sake…)