Thursday, October 19, 2006

IE7, any real improvement?

Now that IE7 is out, I will be 'upgrading' to it to ensure my web sites support it, but I wonder have much of an upgrade it really is -- especially since they've had 5 years to improve it.

I got an email this morning from eWEEK highlighting Jim Rapoza's glowing review of IE7. One one hand, he acknowledges that IE7 hasn't made any revolutionary step forward in the browser space, but has merely caught up as he says,

While we wouldn't yet call IE 7 one of the best browsers available today, Microsoft has greatly closed the distance between its browser and those of its competitors. Version 7 catches IE up with now-common browser features...



but after summarizing the key user interface and security enhancements, he makes this statement,

On the standards side, IE 7 does a much better job than previous versions of the product at supporting key standards, such as Cascading Style Sheets support and JavaScript. IE 7 still doesn't have perfect standards support, but it is much better than previous versions of the browser.



That statement puzzles me since according to this analysis which summarizes web browser standards support, I see very little improvement in standards support except in CSS 2.1 & 3 Basic Selectors.

To me, it sounds like Microsoft has merely put a new glossy finish on a rotting infrastructure (a whitewashed tomb so to speak) which is really disappointing to me, since after listening to this interview of the IE7 team by the Ajaxians last month, I was more optimistic about standards support.

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