IE7

One of the more interesting things this week has been the release of the second beta test of Internet Explorer 7. Supposedly it’s all-singing all-dancing – and of course with the work I’m doing, I had to download the test.

I’ve only been using it a couple of days, but already it has good and bad bits. Yes, it’s certainly better than IE6, and by a considerable margin. Mind you, in many ways it’d be difficult to be worse. But is it the Firefox-killer it was mooted to be?

In short, no. It still doesn’t handle the CSS standards as well as Firefox (or Opera, or Mozilla, or Seamonkey, or Safari, or – well – anything, really), it still has idiosyncacies that shouldn’t exist, and it’ll still mean lots of people design sites purely for IE that then break in any other browser. (On a personal basis, I have a tendency now to develop sites that work in everything else, but then break in IE because I haven’t tested them there – I know, I should – but well, it’s using IE. It just makes me shudder)

I’ll write more about it as I use it more, I’m sure.