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dotBiz

Internet Explorer 7 Is Here

dotBiz logo Many people consider the number 7 to be lucky, and include it in their regular Lottery numbers. Well, Microsoft is hoping that seven is going to be lucky for them with the latest incarnation of their web browser, Version 7.

Looking at Microsoft's own website, they claim that IE7 "is a major step forward in ease of use and security". I have to say that they are right - it's way ahead of version 6 with the new range of features and gizmos it now offers. Having said that, though, many of these new attributes have been around for the last couple of years in the likes of Firefox and Opera - other freely-available web browsers.

I've mentioned IE7 in the past, but I bring it up again now for three very good reasons. First, it is now officially available to download from Microsoft's website - there's a link to it direct from the Homepage. Second, Mr Gates is so keen to get this version out there that he's making it a forced download through Windows Update. If your Windows XP PC is set to update itself automatically, you will more than likely find yourself looking at a new web browser over the next few weeks.

The third reason for talking about it again is because IE7 actually works properly.or mostly properly from what we've seen of it so far. "Hold on, though," you say. "I have IE6 on my machine, and it works just fine." Well, yes and no. You may not realise this, but all web browsers will display pages slightly differently. There are standards to which web browsers are supposed to adhere, and for "standards-compliant" browsers, most of the differences are not very noticeable, and cause no great headaches for us designers. Not so with IE6, which was riddled with bugs and inconsistencies.

This meant that pages that work fine in all other browsers, could go haywire in IE6. To get over this, many design companies used work-arounds called 'hacks'. It would take an entire article, or more, to explain exactly what they do, but suffice to say that they are ways of forcing IE6 to display a page more or less how it should be.

Now, I've never been a great fan of these: hacks are fine when you're trying to fix something that's "broken". Well, IE7 has addressed many of these standards issues, and is now playing ball with the rest of them. This means that many of the hacks that were put in place are now redundant, and could actually cause web pages to be displayed incorrectly in IE7.

What should you do, then? Try and check your website in IE7 as soon as possible. If you don't have IE7 yet, or you're not sure how to go about downloading it manually, try and find someone who has it installed and get them to check it. If it doesn't look as it should, get it fixed as soon as possible. In the past, take up of new Internet Explorer releases has been quite slow, but with Microsoft forcing systems to update to version 7 very soon, you can't hang around on this!

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