Ramblings

Two weeks ago Microsoft developers made a fuss about their upcoming version of MSIE that is bumped up to version 7.

In addition to get the word out about the update they advised people to start preparing for the new browser. A suggestion was to let web pages be aware of the User-Agent string now containing IE7 instead of IE6.

I will refrain from commenting on the advice itself but rather be constructive and advise you how to really prepare for MS Internet Explorer 7.

Much-ado about nothing
Judging by the calculated "leaks" lately about what MSIE 7 will support and not support, there are relly no real changes that really matter.

They will fix bugs, but only the most serious bugs, they will update the browser to follow some standards that break, but only the most important and so on:

In IE7, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that web developers hit as we can, and we will add the critical most-requested features from the standards as well. Though you won’t see (most of) these until Beta 2

- Ok, so lots of fuss about something that is still not out. Talk about smoke and mirrors.

In the web platform team that I lead, our top priority is (and will likely always be) security – not just mechanical “fix buffer overruns” type stuff, but innovative stuff like the anti-phishing work and low-rights IE.

- Yeah, innovation over there probably means "look what the others do"

We fully recognize that IE is behind the game today in CSS support. We’ve dug through the Acid 2 Test and analyzed IE’s problems with the test in some great detail, and we’ve made sure the bugs and features are on our list - however, there are some fairly large and difficult features to implement, and they will not all sort to the top of the stack in IE7.

- Ok, so a rewrite is necessary to make the browser useful? After 6 years since last the release of MSIE 6 you would expect a bit more.

Prepare as a user
If you want to prepare for MSIE 7, stop using Microsoft Explorer. Use Opera, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror, Galeon, Epiphany or any other browser that follows standards, is being updated and will continue following the open standards in the future.

By switching from MSIE to any of those browsers you get an instant boost in your Internet experience, web pages will show up faster, you can do things more efficient, you will be surfing more secure and webmasters can finally concentrate on following the standards instead of adding hacks to make the pages work with MSIE.

This means they can concentrate more on making web pages better interface-wise or content-wise in addition of being able to use modern standards to increase the overall quality of web pages.

In other words, by ditching Microsoft Explorer right now, you do yourself and the rest of the world a favour.

For web developers
Prepare for MSIE 7 by dropping all MSIE specific features and embrace the open standards. As a web developer you will save huge amounts of time by only needing to follow the standards and testing pages with proper browsers.

If you follow the standards you will get less people complaining about your pages not working, because since you have followed the standards you are doing it "the right way".

The responsibility of rendering pages correctly as long as you've made your pages according to the standards is up to the browser manufacturer. Browser manufacturer should like the rest of the world compete about making a solid product rather than web developers degrading their pages just because at a given time one browser is more widely spread than others.

• By using the standards you let users get the most of your web pages by using proper browsers.


• The more web developers that use standards the higher is the chance Microsoft will bother making their browser work with them.


• By stopping making hacks specially for MSIE more pages will work on more browsers.

Standards: http://www.w3c.org

Download Opera: http://opera.com/download