Audience of One

IE 7

Just to add my voice to the many, Internet Explorer version 7 is going to be released soonish. Whether or not this is a good thing remains to be seen. If IE7 fixes the many, many issues it has with CSS and XHTML (see the about design page for more information) then it’s a good thing, as a lot of IE users will upgrade to it. If it ignores the rendering problems and concentrates on security (as I expect) it’s a bad thing. Suddenly, Internet Explorer is a lot securer (we’d assume), and there goes part of the argument for installing Firefox or Opera – the part most people understand. You try and convince someone to change their browser because it has tabs or some other feature and you often hit a brick wall. You try and convince them because their browser is letting in spyware, slowing their system down and potentially allowing hackers to steal their credit card details and you get a lot further.

Even worse would be a security-enhanced IE7 that fixes some CSS parsing bugs. For those of you who don’t understand these things, it’s a bit like driving. If you had a narrow, country road that would be destroyed by a really heavy car, it’s okay because the really heavy cars can’t fit through the gap to get onto the road because they’re so wide. Imagine if the car manufacturer made the car thinner. Suddenly, this really heavy car would be able to get onto the beautiful country road. It’s like that with CSS – web designers can block Internet Explorer from the nicest parts of the code because IE can’t cope with them. What happens if IE can suddenly get around the blocks but still not cope with the complex code?

This was only supposed to be a brief entry, so I’ll shut up now with an encouragement to get Firefox and browse happy – please.

Matthew @ 11:09, March 12, 2005 to Geek | Comments (0)