Guillermo Rauch has an excellent article ripping in to the fact that Microsoft promised Internet Explorer 7 would fall in-line with the expectations of digital designers, but has instead done little more than create new problems for us:

For the last couple of years, we developers have been struggling with IE incompatibilities while creating and testing our sites. Those include the non-native support for PNG transparencies, the box model bug, and many many more.

IE7, however, was supposed to solve all these bugs, and add those all missing features. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In this article I’ll highlight some of the new built-in annoyances.

PNG issue solved. Or not

Microsoft expert developers claimed in April 26, 2005 that “overall, transparent PNG support is looking quite solid in IE7, based on our tests“. I’ll show you now how solid it really is.

I recently published an article that went through the creation of a menu which used some 32Bit transparent pngs, and if the browser didn’t support them, it’d rely on gifs. As my personal computer is a MacBook PRO, I could only test it with Safari, Firefox, and my brother’s Internet Explorer 6. I trusted IE7 developers, and I assumed that PNG would work fine with that browser. Shortly after making it to the Digg homepage, I found out that my menu wasn’t working on IE7.

More CSS and rendering bugs

Although they’ve successfully fixed many bugs, it’s still quite evident that their browser is still far from perfect.

This is an interesting list of sites full of IE7 bugs:

The most useful fix of all if the creation of separate style-sheets for separate browsers, achieved by doing writing (something similar, and then backing it up with the relevant files that it points to) like this:

<!–[if lte IE 6]>
<style type=”text/css” media=”all”>@import “/css/ie6.css”;</style>
<![endif]–>
<!–[if gt IE 6]>
<style type=”text/css” media=”all”>@import “/css/ie7.css”;</style>
<![endif]–>

What now?

If we check some browser usage stats, there’s no doubt that IE7 is already an important player. But IE6 still doubles its share, which only means that we not only have to support, struggle and deal with IE6 inefficiencies, but also with those that Microsoft has now introduced with IE7.