Internet Explorer 7

Internet Explorer 7 has officially been released. It is live and you can download it from Microsoft.com/ie/. If you have been building web sites for any number of years, you are familiar with the dread that is IE 6 when it comes to CSS and how it interprets the specifications [1] [2.1] [3]. Well, IE 7, out of the box, does certainly do a better job than IE 6.

Today’s post is a really quick review of the IE 7 browser. Here are a few things, in no particular order, that we have noticed so far:


  • Fly out menus are breaking. If your site uses semantic markup on unordered lists and reveals those lists based on visitor movement, you are likely going to be frustrated when you visit in IE 7. We are looking under the hood as you read this to try and determine a solution and will post it once we have solved the issue.
  • Handling of SSL certificates is scary. If you visit a site with an expired SSL certificate, you are not given a popup warning, but a FULL screen warning. On top of that, you are shown a Green shield with a check box. When you click it, it closes the browser. You have to click the Red shield with the X on it actually advance to the site in question. Very backwards at first glance.
  • FTP is still broken and unuseable. See Wil’s IE 7 Beta 3 FTP post for more details.
  • Tabbed browsing is now part of IE. Unlike Firefox, IE does it right away without having to enable tabbed-browsing. So full marks to IE for this.
  • Floated LIs are getting blown up to the width of the containing element. This is likely a flaw in our CSS. We will post the cause and fix when we sort it out.
  • Centering of all text. This is again likely a flaw in our CSS. We will post a cause and fix when we sort it out.

As for when the general public will be getting IE 7 pushed to them, that happens on November 1st. For all our developer friends, prepare your fingers, there are many hours of upgrading CSS coming before Christmas.

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