I agree - I think what happened to me was very unusual - I think it’s some kind of hardware-specific problem - I have seen it reported by a few other people though.
But my main gripe, really, with IE7 is that I don’t find it all that usable - the layout of the whole thing just seems aesthetically and ergonomically offensive to me, plus, on the machines I have managed to install it on, it seems sluggish and quirky in browsing and rendering.
True, true. Though the percentages are rather audience dependent: W3Schools’ stats (a more than average techy group) puts IE usage a bit over 50%, OSS sites such as Sourceforge show higher non-IE access (unsurprisingly). My reason for the quibble on “vast majority” was just that not long ago IE had something like a 95+% market share, and while it is still (with few exceptional areas) the predominant browser it is no longer the only game in town.
The gist of my OP was not browser snobbery however, or about life-choice, but happiness that MS has finally embraced (in a good way) the CSS standards, something that will be good for all web users (at least once IE6 finally dies off).
Commercial sites are likely to work in IE7, unless they are old and really hacky in order to work with IE6 – in which case they will likely be broken in anything other than IE6, including IE7. This is the problem with some of our clients’ old web applications.
If you like IE7 that’s great. I like it rather more than IE6 – tho I find the changes to the top menu bar counter-intuitive – and after working with it for a while I’m disappointed that it didn’t go as far towards standards compliance as I had hoped.
(Which i find sad because the IE7 team’s approach seemed so good to me – they said from the outset they wouldn’t pass Acid Test 2, but that they were using the IE6 bug lists at sites like Position Is Everthing as their “ToDo” list).
My interest in this is not about putting down anyones choices, but as a web application designer; Firefox gives me more tools to help with my job, and most of the extra time we take building the UI is dealing with IE idiosyncrasies – something we want to work around rather than incorporate as we don’t want vendor lock-in. (Two indispensable FF tools: (Web Developer Toolbar, and Firebug – which also has a Lite version for use in other browsers. IE7 also has its own Internet Developer Toolbar, which is worthwhile but unfortunately not as useful as Firebug)
MS are between something of a rock and a hard place (of their own making – which may explain the lack of sympathy). Much of the recent furor over IE8 and standards compliance was around their announcement that IE8 passed the Acid 2 Test (over which there was much joy) followed by the announcement that developers would have to put a special meta tag into their pages to tell IE8 that “yes we really want you to render in standards mode. not IE7 mode”, which (technically speaking) means it wouldn’t pass a standards test, as the meta tag isn’t part of the standards. It wouldn’t be a big deal for web application developers with server-side generated code, (like us), but it was seen by many as a sub-optimal solution. Last week MS announced they had a new decision; IE8 will be standards compliant by default. (It has a button right on the toolbar that can flip it into IE7 mode if the user has a problem with a page).
CSS Zen Garden and the complex spiral do seem OK in 7 – posting this from home… part of the problem with testing multiple IE versions is getting more than once version of IE on the same machine.
I’m guessing you didn’t mean the Acid 2 Test looked OK on IE7 – the actual test page, not the site intro page: Acid 2 test page, click the left link and then compare to the image behind the right link.
Web stats are very audience specific, but looking at some mainstream stats IE7 seems to be running to about 40% of overall IE usage, and gaining a percent or more each month. I think we can assume it will have the majority share of IE users by the end of the year, unless IE8 causes a leapfrog effect.
Thank you for that update. I have noticed on the websites I have created for others that you are about right with those stats, and will be a lot happier once I can cross IE6 off the list of things to worry about…but even though it might be under 50% by the end of the year, I think I will wait until it falls in the 20-30% category before switching over to IE7.
Of course by then there will probably be an IE8, IE9 and IE10 to deal with, plus the super-duper beta IE11 that will be on the horizon. And of course, none of them will be completely compatible with the others…