IE7 Launched
Well, Internet Explorer 7 was officially launched this week. I believe that it has been downloaded approx. 3 millions times and counting so far. It’s got a host of new features on it… generally moving to a more FF way of life I think. If you want to get the download before it gets shipped with automatic updates in the coming weeks, you can download it here: IE7 Download.
For us designers and developers, we have the added pleasure of testing and re-testing our sites/applications to ensure compatibility with the new release. For this site, there wasn’t too much that had to be done. An extra css file for IE7 only with about 7 class references did the trick. I’m sure with larger websites or more complex layout websites, there will be a lot more tweaking needed to be done. For anyone that’s interested, the only changes that were really needed for this site was the addition of the conditional css reference in the head and a few css classes in an IE7 only css file, that didn’t use traditional IE6 hacks (*html) but did the same thing. You can view the source to have a look at the file. There’s probably easier ways to do it but this worked and only took about 20 mins to set up and fix, so I’m happy with that!
All in all, I welcome the new release… it’s moving to a more standard compliant browser but personally, I prefer FireFox so I think I’ll stick with only using IE for testing.