What We All Need From IE7
Microsoft added an interesting post to their IE 7 blog the other day, but between the lines it worries me a little that they aren’t doing enough for their next release. They sound like they’re concentrating on “bugs,” but I think they have much bigger problems they need to solve. Here’s what the web developer community needs most from IE 7:
1.) We need IE 6 (and really IE 5.5 as well) to be IE 7. The most important part of Microsoft rolling out a new browser is to get as many computers as humanly possible to upgrade to its features. All computers that get security updates that are currently using IE 5 or 5.5 or 6 should be upgraded to IE 7. If Microsoft wants to get on developers’ good sides, they’ll upgrade everyone to a new browser instead of further splicing the browser market. We have to develop for the most reasonably low common denominator, and if that’s still IE 5.5, it’s still IE 5.5. The worst thing they could do is only release IE 7 for Longhorn users. If, in 2008, the browser market share is 30% IE7, 30% IE6, 30% Firefox, 5% Safari, and still something like 5% IE 5.5 and less, we’re not much better off.
2.) We need support for CSS 2.1. There are so many things that we could do with CSS that we can’t do right now because only people using Firefox can benefit from them. Most importantly, all of the selectors need to work. The “:hover” pseudoclass is supposed to work on any element, not just links, and it would save a ton of javascript hassle if we could use that. The “:before” and “:after” pseudoclasses could let us put any HTML around elements, making all the crazy methods for adding rounded corners and dropshadows completely unnecessary. The sibling selector (”div + div”) would let us use plain markup to put dividing lines between all the elements in a list without having an extra dividing line at the bottom. The list goes on…
Right now we all have to hack into our own HTML code just to make our pages work in IE. Help us clean up the cruft of the internet, Microsoft.
What IE 7 Should do:
IE 7 should do a whole lot more than that. If it releases in 2006, it probably won’t see another feature update until 2010. That means that what it should really do is leapfrog everyone else and let Mozilla and Safari work to catch up. They should take the parts of CSS 3 that are done and implement them, and take the parts of CSS3 that aren’t done yet, finish them, and implement them. If they want to have some bragging rights, they should build in some features that Firefox doesn’t have instead of just playing catch-up themselves. Then when Firefox builds the same features, everyone will be better off.
