My views on Internet Explorer 7
You may have noticed that Microsoft recently released a public beta of Internet Explorer 7 (RC 1 at the time of this posting) and there have been mixed thoughts and a ton of false facts. At the top of the false facts list is thinking that IE still has poor/limited PNG support but that simply isn’t true. IE 7 now supports transparent PNG’s and doing so really allows designers to take advantage their amazing quality. The CSS support in the latest version is 100 times better than that found in IE 6, you no longer will have to hack up your sites to achieve the same task as you do in other browsers, with some exceptions of course.
I have noticed a lot of people talking about it’s similarity to other browsers (in the design aspect) but my answer is simply this, would you want it any other way? Think of it like this, you know and expect a program to look a certain way when you first use it and when it doesn’t “freeware apps” you quickly notice it. IE would have confused almost every user if they had decided to change the way a browser should look.
Another pretty cool addition to IE 7 is a live preview of tabs whihc allows me to quickly watch updates for changes. A good example is breaking news on CNN, a big red banner appears when there is breaking news and I can quickly see it come in. You will see RSS support native to the browser now and you will also find an arsenal of security measures, the coolest being Phishing protection. This is a program running alongside IE that watches for a site trying to get your form data without you knowing it by faking out the recipient of that data.
I haven’t had the time to extensively test out the rendering speed and graphical portion but I entertain any comments on that portion and once I get some free time I will have a go at it myself. All in all I am happy to see IE getting some much needed upgrades and simply can’t wait for PNG’s to become the GIF’s of the future.
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