IE7 Options

[camsmith]

I've just downloaded the public beta of IE7. Haven't used it much and must say that it looks very "Mac".

Some of the features (e.g. RSS feeds) seem pretty good. Some of them (e.g. tabbed browsing) are just catching IE up with the marketplace. We were also promised a fix to the image transparency problem which I haven't had a chance to check out yet.

If you don't know what "beta" means, then you are probably better off waiting a while. If you want to download it though, check out Microsoft's site

[james]

Lol - I bet it has kept you awake at night

Basically what it all means is that IE7 will properly support 8bit alpha channels in PNG graphics (allowing proper anti-aliasing and drop shadow effects). As an example - if you look at my avatar, if you have a modern browser you will see no background around him/me, only what's behind the graphic (the blue of the forum skin). In shitty browsers (that IE/Win previous to IE7) you will see a light blue background round the avatar where they have fucked up how the file is rendered.

For a more visual take on the right dogs breakfast the IE team is making of the IE7 toolbar - have a gander at this screenie: http://www.activewin.com/screenshots/vista...h%20Results.JPG

So that's at least 3 styles of buttons, the menu bar in a different place from every other app, redundant buttons (why do you need a refresh and a stop button, a page can only ever need one or the other depending on if it is currently refreshing so make one button which changes function contextually), buttons which have no visual meaning (at least not to me - but I am thick) so you need to press them to find out what happens, a teenie-weenie area for tabs (with only 4 tabs you can see that you have no real idea what each one is as the names are all truncated) and just a generally cluttered UI.

For an example of what I think is a reasonably good browser UI check out the Apple safari page - sorry Cam, I'm still not really seeing how IE7 is looking Mac-like, but each to their own!

I'm not going to go into the IE7/css thing here (unless anyone wants to) - but as an example of how they are getting on in making CSS work properly check out Andy Clarkes And All That (IE7) Malarkey. Ouch.