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]

If you didn't live so far away I would drive over to punch you. Looks very "Mac" my hairy arse!
I'm a bit pushed for time right now but I'll post up on this later - the IE7 project could (and should) be the answer to many a designers woes - but based on past experience and the current beta...

[camsmith]

Haha, that was meant to be more of a dig at M$ originality than Mac. I've got a Mac user sitting next to me and he knows what I mean.

I've just checked out the PNG transparency issue and it has been fixed!

About bloody time is all I have to say.

PS. I had no idea how hairy your arse was!

[james]

Gotcha - can sort of see what you mean (mind you some of the Vista 'features' make me smile in that way) but from the screenies I've seen of the IE7 toolbar it's an abomination of (lack of) design - I expect it will be changed by the final release.

Glad to hear PNG transparency is fixed - it's a biggie in terms of visual design and the existing hacks to make it work with IE<7 were flawed (hell, one of them [the .htc fix] was just fine until M$ broke it with XPsp2 - genius).

Now if they can fix all the css rendering bugs, whitespace bugs, missing css features and hacks then all will be well in the world!

PS. Hairy. Real hairy.

[paul]

I must admit the PNG transparency has been worrying me for a while

Have they made it more or less see through now??

[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.

[Jeffers]

Can someone please give me back the last 5 minutes of my life...?

[neil]

Surely you would like the last 5 years.........?

[Matt]

Can someone please give me back the last 5 minutes of my life...?

Please see the T&Cs of Ringer:

"Ringer Patrol cannot accept responsibility for time lost by pointlessly reading things that hold no interest to the reader. Ringer will happily refund the 2.5 seconds it took to read the topic title but cannot be held financially or otherwise viable for any time or money lost by the process of trying to understand terms that would not interest the reader even if they knew what they meant.

If the reader wishes to file a complaint with respect to time lost, please send an email to NotMyTopic@ringerpatrol.net detailing the time lost in respect to pointless browsing and the reason for which you wasted you own time on the topic. Your statutory rights are not affected by this and please note we cannot refund the time it takes to write the actual complaint email or the time taken to read this extended condition".

Think that might clear it up.

Geek out.


Edit:
Right, I think I've located the lost 5 minitures of your life here

This post has been edited by Matt: Feb 10 2006, 12:36 PM