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IE7 Beta 2

IE7 Beta 2 has arrived; and it isn’t good news.

Update 01/02: Apparently this Digg entry has details of how to install it alongside IE6 (unverified, as it’s blocked by my work profanity filter at the moment – make of that what you will…) (via)

2nd update: There’s an IE6 standalone over at Evolt as well (via)

Interested parties that have been following the news on the IE Blog will know that IE7 is supposed to address many of our least favourite CSS bugs while simultaneously breaking our IE hacks; the hope is, though, that the two developments will cancel each other out.

It turns out that, based on this beta, that is not quite the case for many popular sites.

The walking wounded

Before we start I just want to say that in no way is this commentary an indictment of the CSS skills of the designers involved; these are some of my favourite sites, so of course they were the first ones I visited with IE7. I think it is useful to show that even the people who know this stuff better than any of us are likely to need to re-hack their stylesheets to cater for Microsoft’s latest spawn release.

The most common failing of IE7 I’ve come across has been the handling of transparency. Several sites using simple transparency are not rendering properly, among them Avalonstar, Molly.com and Escape Crate.

Other mis-handled aspects of the websites I visited included:

• Layout issues on CSS Reboot
• Micalculated element height on Mezzoblue
• Broken Javascript on Shaun Inman’s site

Advanced CSS users beware

The most badly messed-up site I looked at was Andy Clarke’s And All That Malarkey. Andy’s recent brilliant redesign made use of advanced CSS such as attribute selectors to deliver strikingly different versions of the site to compliant and non-compliant (i.e. IE) browsers.

Unfortunately, IE7 seems to be picking up a mish-mash of both styles – the advanced and the basic – with the end result that the site is a bit of a mess; the left-hand navigation is pretty much unusable.

These are the only sites I found to have problems, though; all the other sites I visited (basically everyone on my Bloglines list) was fine, on their homepage at least.

But it’s still only beta, right?

Well yes, but in software terms beta (and Beta 2, no less) usually means “pretty much ready for release”; so I don’t think that whatever is causing all these issues is going to go away before the final public release of IE7.

It will be interesting to see if the IE7 upgrade is presented to home users in the same way as security upgrades are – “here, download this now” with no explanation – or if upgrading will be a manual process. The speed of uptake will be a factor in how quickly solutions to these issues are found.

Further reading

• The IE Blog
• CSS Hack Management
• Peter-Paul Koch on Conditional Comments (Microsoft’s recommendation for handling IE-specific CSS requirements)

Addendum

If anyone wants their own site screenshotted and adding to the Flickr set, leave a comment and I’ll add you as soon as I can.

Postscript

Some further exploration has turned up a few other nasty surprises:

• No hover effects on some sites?
• Leahy/Langridge no longer working?

I’ll update this with any more new strange behaviour as I find it.

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