I’ve been trying to keep up with recent news and developments related to the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7, the first major update to the browser since 2001 (5 years!). When visiting the IEBlog today, I noticed a post about IE7′s upcoming release.

A quote near the top reads:

We are currently locking down IE7 for shipping and I wanted to give an update on the CSS work that went into IE7.

One thing that is greatly anticipated about IE7 is the number of rendering bugs for HTML and CSS that have been fixed. This may not mean much to anyone that doesn’t know about web develoment, but to others who build websites, myself included, this is good news. I have had frustrating moments with IE6 in recent years when trying to get a paid laid out and styled correctly; most other browsers (I prefer Firefox, but there are also Opera and Safari) tend to get these things right, but IE6 often does not.

As an example of bug fixes, look at Position Is Everything. That listing on the side is an inventory of various rendering bugs present in IE6, all of which have been fixed for IE7, except for one: the escaping floats bug, not fixable in IE7, but to be expected in a later release.

Additionally, more new features have been added that were not supported before: transparent PNG images, :hover on all elements (not just links), and so on. I know some of them will be much appreciated!

IE7 doesn’t fix all the bugs, or add al the desired features available in other browsers, but the IE Team are promising more frequent updates and releases for the browser, which means these items will be fixed or added over time.

Once IE7 is released, it may make web development just a bit easier, as IE7 will be more consistent with other browsers than IE6. So there is much work involved in getting a page to work and appear consistently across different browsers.

Hopefully IE7 will reduce this problem. Hopefully.

I say hopefully because even when released, it won’t immediately be used by everyone. First off, IE7 is only for Windows XP, with Service Pack 2, and newer systems. So those on Windows 98 or 2000 will be out of luck.

As a plus side, for those that can use IE7, it will be automatically pushed out to users via Windows Update. So users don’t even need to do anything; next time Windows Update runs, IE7 will be downloaded and installed. Although this can be seen as a downside as well; some people may not want to upgrade right away, or even at all. Corporate environments, for example, tend to wait before installing upgrades and updates so any immediate bugs can be shaken out first. Then there’s testing. And so on.

Additionally, even if web developers are able to more easily develop pages, with IE7 having better support, it will still be necessary to support IE6 (and it’s deficiencies) for several years until adoption of IE7 is more widespread. And if pages look good in IE7 on a developer’s computer, it won’t look the same on a user’s system unless the user is using IE7.

I haven’t yet tried any of the IE7 betas, but I look forward to using the finished product, once it is released. Speaking of which, there is still no official release date, but it is expected to be in the last few months of this year.

For additional reading, there’s some good discussion on possible new issues with IE7 on mezzoblue.