Internet Explorer 7

So I’ve been holding off installing IE7 mainly because with my work, I still need to do a lot of compatibility testing in IE6 and there really wasn’t any elegant solutions for running IE6 and IE7 side by side, at least not until recently. Microsoft made their Virtual PC 2004 software free which allows you to run other operating systems simultaneously. They also released a free image of Windows XP SP2 with IE6 that will last until April 2007. This allows web developers to run both IE6 and IE7 simultaneously and since I’ve slowly started receiving client requests for IE7 compatibility, I thought might as well take the plunge.

IE7 is actually much more improved over IE6, and I’d recommend average users to upgrade. Not only is it more secure with better popup blocking and phishing protection, it’s got tabbed browsing. Tabbed browsing is so much more convenient. I also like the new, cleaner interface. I’m still sticking with Firefox but good job to Microsoft for creating a more standards-compliant, improved browser.

I checked many of the sites I’ve developed and surprisingly all of them are compatible in IE7. No wonder I haven’t been getting complaints from past clients. I had read that very standards-based sites didn’t fare well with the IE7 transition but everything looks okay when I checked several of the sites I built. So yay, less unpaid work for me. This is why standards compliance matters. Developers left and right are groaning about IE7 compatibility because of all the hacks they’ve put up and browser-specific stylesheets that now need to be updated. When I code, I minimize hacks and if I absolutely must, I use the star html hack which doesn’t work in IE7 so it’s graceful. I’m happy to see IE7’s standards-compliance claims have held up.

Sorry for the all the web development geekiness. Perhaps I should start a separate blog. But no time.. no time to even redesign this site.. no time.. must go work now.

P.S. This Virtual PC thing is pretty cool. I’m actually booting up another Windows XP inside a window.