Pinch me, I must be dreaming!
At long last, Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 is available for all interested developers to download and provide feedback. Fair warning: Microsoft seems to be batting for the “ugliest splash page” award with that site. Cheap shot, I know, but seriously–my retinas itch.
As always, the IEBlog is a must-read for all web designers, who will doubtless be putting in some long hours this year to discover the ins and outs of a world where IE 5, IE 6, and IE 7 must coexist. Over the past 24 hours, Microsoft has posted all sorts of useful information about the beta on the blog.
Let the CSS de-hacking (re-hacking?) begin!
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Brilliant – thanks for the udpate.
Now can anyone tell me if I install this IE7 beta, will it happily co-exist with my current IE6 or am I going to be stuck with IE7?
February 1st, 2006 at 6:55 am
According to the IEBlogs site, this installation will replace IE6 currently on the computer.
While the IEBlogs site suggests hacks are available to allow the two to run simulatneously these aren’t supported, naturally!
February 1st, 2006 at 7:51 am
Thanks for the info DBrown.
Well that’s a shame – can’t give up IE6 yet as I need to support it. Guess I’ll have to find a spare computer ;)
February 1st, 2006 at 8:25 am
Note that IE7 supports IDN domains so you can navigate to URLs in Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and other characters. Pretty cool!
February 1st, 2006 at 9:20 am
Argh! It doesn’t work on XP SP1! I really didn’t want to install SP2 but I think I just might have to judging by this new “This program only works on SP2 or above” initiative Microsoft seem to be having… Which is a good thing i suppose.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:33 am
It looks like it’s handling pages well–everything on the sites I develop looks perfect. I use the star html hack to design for IE6 incompatibilities, and it seems that IE7 works fine ignoring it and rendering like other browsers.
It doesn’t come close to passing Acid 2, but it’s probably not because of vital CSS incompatibilities.
Oh, and they finally fixed the box model!
February 1st, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Funny enough, Sitepoint’s main page looks completely different under IE7b2. The front page has a horizontal scrollbar (though with no apparent content to the righthand side), and the fonts are a bit smaller (I typically keep IE’s font size set to “smaller”) though still legible.
February 1st, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Just in case anyone still needs to know. To install alongside IE6 do the following….
Extract using stuffit or similar, don’t run the installer.
Create an empty file inside the resulting folder called iexplore.exe.local
Run the app.
February 1st, 2006 at 5:26 pm
Ok, I used to have IE7beta1 on my machine, upgraded to beta 2 after reading this, and quite frankly I’m dissappointed. Beta 1 was a LOT more compatible than beta 2.
Differences so far based on browsing through Sitepoint …
1. Beta 2 has the horizontal scrollbar as noted by mjackson42
2. Beta 2’s default font size is a LOT smaller, more in line with Firefox and co
3. Sitepoint home page doesn’t render correctly in beta 2 (boxes are shifted up the page slightly, big white area to the right of the page), but it did in beta 1
4. If you hover the mouse over a blog entry comment text, the icon starts its shouting animation (this didn’t do that in beta 1 or previous IE releases)
5. Beta 2 now displays the vertical scrollbar on the page all the time as per Firefox and friends, which means most sites will suffer the right side padding issue where the horizontal scrollbar kicks in to scroll the width of the vertical scrollbar.
6. Beta 2 has duplicated the file/tool/etc menus with some unintuitive icons at the tab level.
7. Beta 2 finally has seperated the menu and toolbars from the tab
8. Beta 2 has seperated the stop and refresh buttons again (beta 1 had them as the same button depending on context dictated what the button did. eg. why stop an already loaded page?)
9. Beta 2 has a noticable new theme to it which I’m guessing is in line with the new Vista theme?
10. Cant say I’ve ever had a need to zoom into a page to 1000% but now I can :)
11. Sitepoints pin striped background image doesn’t tile any more down the page in beta 2
Biggest issues for me right now is retesting all my apps now that there are substantial rendering differences between beta 1 and beta 2 namely font size and positioning/box model “fixes”.
Other than the fact it looks nicer than beta 1, beta 2 so far seems a step backwards in some areas considering IE7 was supposed to be a fairly compatible release with previous releases. Looks like developers may have their wish about getting MS to just cut their loses, fix the browser and deal with the issues now so we can get to a point of “one codebase/stylesheet to rule them all”.
I’ll post any more things I notice as I do more testing today with all our inhouse apps.
Si far its been good because I’ve had access to beta 1 and nobody else in the company has really run it seriously. Would have figured the whole point of going public with the beta 2 release was because developers had tested beta 1, fixed any issues, now release beta 2 to everyone else so they can experience the new stuff. Now I’m faced with potentially fixing stuff that wasn’t broken in the previous release because everyone in our company can download from that public url and upgrade BEFORE I get a chance to fully test everything.
February 1st, 2006 at 6:18 pm
Extra findings …
We use a USB authentication portal which uses the Java plugin to do its dirty work. Seems there is some confusion with Java and the tabs (which I think is also in Firefox) where the runtime loads when a tab initiates the code, but doesn’t shutdown until the whole browser is closed. I had a situation where the wrong tab was hijacked when I yanked out the USB key then put it back in again after shutting down the one that should have been hijacked.
Basic Authentication has been fixed in beta 2, was completely broken in beta 1.
I’m going to give beta 2 the “Useless feature of the year” award. Our main web app uses popups in areas for user input forms, every popup now contains the URL dropdown list at the top of the popup. At first I was annoyed because now I cant hide the urls from our users and I cant lock them into that window, then I tried to use it to switch to another site. But you cant change it, it still stays on the same page, just gives you the ability to view the same list of sites you see when you drop it down normally. What I thought was a security feature/enhancement, now gets my vote for “Useless feature of the year” award.
The Quick tabs feature is excellent if you have a lot of tabs open at the same time, and it also has default tab group support. The tabs have also been “fixed” so they behave the same as Firefox. I guess general consensus would be this is a good thing.
Why does the in built search toolbar default to Yahoo! search rather than MSN Search when its a MS browser? Who knows.
Oh, lastly, turns out the font issues and what have you I mentioned before relate only to sitepoint.com :( Seems that conditional comments are not so cool anymore for the new browsers. Set IE7 to view the same stylesheet as Firefox and I think the results may be more consistent. Please note I haven’t tested this, only a guess based on my observations and tests so far.
February 1st, 2006 at 7:10 pm
If you mean “compatible with the bugs in IE6″, I agree with you.
Yep. I expect this is a side-effect of an IE5/6-specific hack that is no longer needed in IE7 because of CSS fixes in the new browser.
I’ll be looking at this in tomorrow’s issue of the Tech Times, but I would expect that simply disabling our “IE hacks” style sheet in IE7 (using conditional comments as recommended by Microsoft) will go a long way to solving most of the issues you point out.
In my browsing, this issue seems specific to sitepoint.com. Again, I’d say this is an IE5/6-specific hack that is causing incorrect behaviour due to fixes in IE7.
I’m not seeing the shifted boxes. The white area is covered by number 1 above.
Great! That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do! The fact that it didn’t animate in IE6 and IE7b1 was a CSS bug in those browsers.
This is nonsense. The only effective difference here is that the display width of the browser window is reduced by about 16 pixels. This will not cause a horizontal scrollbar unless the site is designed with a fixed width that exceeds the slightly-decreased window dimensions. If you’re designing sites that absolutely need that last 16 pixels of width, you’ve got bigger problems than a horizontal scrollbar in IE7.
These are end-user usability issues. They do not affect web developers, so are not really relevant in this context.
Again, I’ll be looking into this more closely tomorrow, but this appears to be a byproduct of IE7 correctly rendering assigned heights of blocks that have overflowing content. In this case, the block containing the pinstriped background contains the three content columns, but has an assigned height of about zero (plus padding), a hack which corrected other layout issues in IE6. IE6 incorrectly extended the box around the three columns, IE7 now renders it correctly, so again it will just be a matter of disabling the IE6-specific hacks in IE7 using a conditional comment.
There was never any reason to test rendering on beta 1, as Microsoft openly informed developers that the majority of rendering fixes would come with beta 2.
Not so. Microsoft’s stated goal for IE7 is to preserve compatibility only where it does not interfere with standards compliance. Desigining for IE7 will be a lot more like designing for Firefox than it is like designing for IE6.
I’d recommend you set aside half a day to read through the IEBlog.
Si far its been good because I’ve had access to beta 1 and nobody else in the company has really run it seriously. Would have figured the whole point of going public with the beta 2 release was because developers had tested beta 1, fixed any issues, now release beta 2 to everyone else so they can experience the new stuff.
Again, read the IEBlog. The point of going public with beta 2 is so that developers can test all the new rendering fixes. The point of beta 1 was to preview end-user interface innovations like tabbed browsing and anti-phishing.
When Microsoft is ready for the general public to “experience the new stuff”, they’ll release IE7. Betas are for developers, not end users.
The only people who should be downloading and installing the beta are web developers who want to begin testing and fixing the rendering of their sites so that they’ll work with the final release of IE7 later this year. End-users who install the beta should not expect a usable browsing experience, nor should you be responsible for supporting a beta-release browser.
February 1st, 2006 at 7:14 pm
This is exactly the kind of bug Microsoft would be interested in hearing about. If you care about this working correctly in the final release, I suggest you report it via one of the methods described in the IEBlog.
This looks like a great security feature to me. It preserves developers’ ability to create a pop-up that does not provide navigation other than what you provide in the page itself, while still displaying the current URL for security purposes. Firefox did the same thing in its 1.5 release.
The fact that the control is a drop-down just looks to be a UI bug in the beta. No doubt this will be tidied up in the final release.
Side note: Firefox users who would like this functionality (I agree — it rocks!) can grab the foXpose extension that has been out for awhile.
Must be something with your config. It defaulted to MSN Search when it upgraded my factory-defaults IE6 configuration here.
On the contrary, conditional comments are very cool. They let you target different styles for IE5, IE5.5, IE6, and IE7. SitePoint simply uses one style sheet for IE6+ at the moment, which is what causes the rendering issues. We’ll likely change that to IE6 only (with a separate style sheet for IE7 fixes if/as needed) with a simple tweak to the conditional comment — no CSS re-hacking required.
February 1st, 2006 at 7:29 pm
Wow, Kevin… that splash page gave me a headache, and there should probably be some kind of pop-up medical disclaimer in front of it. Reminds me of the Max Headroom episode where people’s heads were exploding from the “blipverts.” You youngsters won’t remember that, sorry…
February 1st, 2006 at 8:59 pm
I can’t install IE7Beta2 on either of my computers at home or even the PC at work :-( Something to do with no having the rights to install a file according to the log, but I’m logged in as an administator.
February 2nd, 2006 at 7:14 am
Same problem, different reason. I don’t run Windows XP. I have a stable computer running as I want it – upgrading to WinXP would disrupt my system and would necessitate upgrading the hardware – all unnecessary expense. From my website logs, roughly one person in four is running an older version of Windows (not counting the difference between SP1 and SP2), so that’s about a third of users who won’t be able to install IE7 at all.
February 2nd, 2006 at 8:47 am
I 100% agree with this, unfortunately, I work for a software development company and our users being developers love to play with new “toys”. As a result we had to issue a company wide warning to all our employees that we would not be supporting IE7 internally until it goes public.
If Microsoft had of released the rendering fixes in similar fashion to beta 1, we wouldn’t have had to take this step as we would have had ample time to test it prior to them having general access. At least we have control over who has access to our MSDN subscription.
February 2nd, 2006 at 5:43 pm
Just thought I might add that from your reaction Kevin, I wasn’t intending to say that Sitepoint’s layout was bad or incompatible, just to highlight differences between beta 1 and beta 2 that I noticed while looking mainly at this site. Considering that I have publicly voiced on these blogs before how good a job I believed beta 1 was at lightening the workload for us developers with another browser release to worry about, I felt I owed it to those that dont have access to anything other than the blogs and media hype on IE7 to clear up those comments which are learly irrelevant now with beta 2 out.
Can you clarify this? I also run Firefox 1.5 and dont have this problem with our popups. Are you referring to the url appearing in the window title as opposed to IE7 putting it in the actual window content?
February 2nd, 2006 at 5:56 pm
Check the FAQ on the IEBlog. There’s a common issue (it affected me too) do do with registry permissions.
February 2nd, 2006 at 7:24 pm
It’s your choice, Stevie D, but you can’t have it both ways. Either you can stick with the configuration that works with you, sacrificing system security and the ability to run current Microsoft software, or you can upgrade and take advantage of the latest software.
As an end-user, you have the luxury of choosing whatever platform you like. Windows 2000 or Windows 98 are both fairly capable operating systems if you’re technically minded enough to protect yourself from security exploits that affect these older OSes. If they do everything you need (and if running IE7 is not something you need), then by all means stick with what works.
As a web developer, however, you do not have that luxury. Part of the responsibility of every professional web developer is to support the multiple browsers and platforms that are in use by the web-browsing public. Whatever OS you choose to run in your own time, you must have access both to the latest and greatest and the nearly obsolete.
I don’t understand your point, here. If you’re suggesting that a browser isn’t worth your time to support unless 100% of your users are able to install it, I would suggest you need to re-evaluate your approach to web development.
February 2nd, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Except for a very small amount of horizontal scrolling (which I am half convinced is a new bug in IE7 that I need to report to Microsoft), the layout of SitePoint has been updated to work correctly in IE7.
Details in today’s Tech Times, which I will send out shortly and copy on this blog.
February 3rd, 2006 at 3:54 am
I have a question, How do you test your web sites in IE7 and 6 and 5 when you can only have one installed at a time. Or are you supposed to have three different machines with the three different versions.
I am mainly concerned with testing in IE7, I know it is still in beta and I do not want to install it on my laptop which will get rid of IE6.
Also, for anyone who has been using IE7 a lot lately, is it a good stable beta, I know it is a beta so I’m not expecting it to be perfect, I’m talking as afar as betas go, what do you think of it?
February 5th, 2006 at 10:34 am
I realise that. Although Microsoft don’t make it easy by forcing pople to jump through burning hoops if they want multiple versions of IE running on the same computer. Not a problem for big businesses, but for a lone web author, the need to have multiple computers in order to do the job properly becomes a nuisance.
The only time I use IE is to check how a website looks in IE. For browsing the web, I use Opera (v6, 7.5 and 8.5 all currently installed), with Firefox as a backup (as far as I’m aware, there are no problems there either with having multiple versions at the same time).
What irritates me is Microsoft’s insistence that everyone upgrade to the latest OS if they want software upgrades. Not just them – Adobe are the same – if you haven’t got XP, they aren’t interested in providing an up-to-date version of the software for you to use.
February 5th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
rbl00, in the past, it always meant keeping old versions of IE on old PCs tacked away under desks. Best case scenario you might have had a monitor switch so you didn’t have to get up to test your site. A couple of years ago Ethan Marcotte figured a way of running them side by side, and Ryan from http://www.skyzyx.com put them all together in a nice package that gives you IE5, IE5.5 and IE4 in a nice package that runs next to your IE6.
http://www.skyzyx.com/archives/000094.php
Position is Everything published a neat tutorial about 12 months ago that alters this set up slightly so its easier to tell which one you’re using and that also enables ‘conditional comments’ (which don’t work by default).
http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/multiIE.html
February 5th, 2006 at 7:54 pm
Has anyone noticed that webpages that use a meta tag refresh to refresh itself takes focus away from whatever window you have focus?
February 5th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
[...] Thank’s to the Kevin’s blog from the Sitepoint (and their brillant newsletter too), I’ve installed IE7 beta 2 on my development machine. The first positive thing about it is that it even works under non-english versions of Windows XP. Previous ‘not so public version’ I’ve tried has worked only under english version of os. At the first glance it looks very cool and promising: [...]
February 7th, 2006 at 4:36 am
I followed instructions of Sitepoint Design View (issue 18 february 10 2006), creating a IE7
folder etc,etc. When i run iexplore.exe a message pops up
Something like this:”Can not find the entrance point in the procedure Rtlpv6StringtoAddressExA in the dynamic link library ntdll.dll” (translated from Spanish version i downloaded)
Can you help me?
Many thanks
Carlos
February 11th, 2006 at 7:47 am
I also followed the instructions of Sitepoint Design View to have IE7b2 as a standalone alongside IE6 which I use half of the time while developing, with Firefox as the deafult. (I have the hacked versions of IE4, 5.0, 5.5 on this PC too).
Now when I try to type in a URL or do a search using google toolbar in IE6, a Firefox window opens. If I set the default to be IE, it uses IE7 which I don’t want – argh!
Further, none of the links on the ‘run once’ page work and it comes up every time.
http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx
I wish I hadn’t followed the procedure in desgin view, and now want to go back but as I didn’t install the app, I can’t uninstall it.
Does anybody know whats wrong, or how to revert back to the way it was before?
February 11th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
jonnyporter: I’m having the same problem as you. Anytime I try to enter a URL in IE6, Firefox pops open and intercepts it. I’d really like to go back to the way things were before…
February 11th, 2006 at 10:56 pm
ok, we as developers/psudo-programmers know that using hacks/workarounds is very risky, so it always helps to do a little fail safe research when testing the waters. I was having a little trouble with the side-by-side hack for IE7beta/IE6 (which is not a recommended or supported way to use the beta/preview of IE7) so I found some help fixing it at this link:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2005/12/28/434132.aspx
hope it is helpful to anyone else who may find themselves in over their head.
CodeLes
February 12th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Just a note to say that the iexplore.exe.local tip is genius :)
February 13th, 2006 at 12:18 am
Just launched IE7 pubic beta…
For once, I think that did a good job with the tab browsing. The fact that you can also view all the pages as thumbnails is a plus I think…
On the other hand …. It doesn’t like ajax (I have a custom page with some ajax on it). IE6 and FireFox works great on that page … so guess still some work to do…
Does it like Linux ? Funny to say that the main page of my linux server doesn’t display on it … can’t even find it…
I will probably wait until MS releases the final version and even maybe wait for the unevitable first patches…
On the overall once all the bugs will be fixed (in the hope they won’t make this a new “standard”)..
Cheers to IE7 ..
February 13th, 2006 at 4:01 am
Hey Everyone,
I did the side by side install suggested by Kevin and did enjoy a working copy of the IE Beta 2. However I discovered that IE 6 developed many issues and removing the beta 2 did not return me to a “normal” IE install. I found this solution that seems to work.
From:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/12/16/504864.aspx
IE December Security Update – addressing scattered reports of odd browser behavior
We have received scattered reports of users experiencing odd browser behavior after installing our most recent security update. Some of you have reported opening a browser window that promptly hangs IE, others have reported opening links that render blank, and finally we have reports of multiple windows opening when initiating a browser session. After investigating several of these reports, we have traced these issues to a common source.
If a user has ever attempted to run IE7 Beta1 in an unsupported side-by-side configuration with a version of IE6, IE7 Beta1 puts a registry key on the machine the first time a user executes the IE7 version of IEXPLORE.EXE. This key is part of an normal IE7 installation on XP, and will not be configured correctly if an unsupported side-by-side install is used. When IE7 is installed using the installer, the key should be removed properly upon uninstall. A machine can also load this registry key and not remove it during a failed IE7 installation.
To address this issue on a machine running IE 6 SP1 with our most recent security update, locate and delete this entire key from the registry of the affected machine: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{c90250f3-4d7d-4991-9b69-a5c5bc1c2ae6}. If you are running IE7 Beta1 in a side-by-side scenario with another version of IE, this is not a supported scenario.
Happy Browsing
February 13th, 2006 at 10:04 am
Galadriann:
From ieblog:
February 14th, 2006 at 4:26 am
Has anyone noticed that drop downs in Forms don’t seem to work. I have IE7 installed on one machine as a regular install and it works fine but using it as a standalone on my laptop, drop downs in Forms do not work at all.
Anyone else having this issue?
Michael
February 14th, 2006 at 10:49 am
Ok, I have more info now, it seems that IE7 (standalone) is somehow seeing drop downs (in forms) as pop ups. Everytime I try to click on a drop down to see the choices I get the Popup blocked message.
Michael
February 14th, 2006 at 11:01 am
Michael, I see what you mean. So far, no obvious solution. Disabling the popup blocker has no effect — even disabling it in IE6 has no impact. We’re going to have to see what the differences in the registry are in the full install.
February 14th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
Havent yet upgraded to IE7, hope it works fine.
February 16th, 2006 at 5:43 am