IE7b2 Testing: day 2

After unsuccessfully struggling with trying to get IE7b2 to run in local mode, I was able to get a test PC I could install it to.

The security problems I mentioned before evaporated. Select menus work. Pages are no longer unjustifiably accused of having popups. That's the good part.

The bad part: CSS support is better but still sketchy in parts. A typical CSS-only CSS menu page like CrazyTB's works but demonstrates the same problems with z-index and "hover holes" that I encountered when adapting the horizontal menus we use on our home page. The z-index issue has to do with daughter menus underlapping parts of the parent menus; the "hover holes" make the menu disappear as you're navigating the elements. Hopefully both can be fixed the way we did it.

HowToCreate's CSS-only menu is a disaster as is Eric Meyer's. How IE7 renders it:

...and how everything else does.

I'll go out on a limb here and guess there's a selector syntax IE7 still doesn't understand. Meyer's CSS2 tests for selector syntax and child selectors indicate that + and > are recognized now, whereas they weren't in IE6. If you've forked your CSS using these operators to hide definitions from IE, you may be in trouble.

When I attempted to create this blog in Blogger, the screen came up but the edit window's text color was white on white. Not funny.

Going through Meyer's CSS2 test suite, we see that it still spectacularly fails every property-based test IE6 fails:

• inherit: tests.
• Quotes? Still fails.
• Min/Max- support? Still not there.
• :before, :after, :content? Nope.
• font-size adjust? Sorry.
• Caption-side? Nein.
• Border-spacing? Uh-uh.
• Empty cells? Not a chance.
• Outline? Forget it.
• Full implementation of OBJECT? Not happening. Images continue to be stuck in scrollframes, and resizing the dimensions resizes the scrollframe, not the image inside it.
• Incorrectly centering block elements with text-align:center? Still doing it.
• BUTTON elements failing to return the contents of the VALUE attribute and instead sending the innerHTML value? No change whatsoever.

Conclusion? This product is lip service to standards and no substantial change from IE6. This was guessed as early as two thousand four. MS improved a handful of unbelievable calculation-based rendering bugs and implemented the missing selector syntax -- but their claims to have rewritten the whole thing from the ground up is bollocks, plain and simple. Bollocks. Couple this with the fact that unless you're running XP SP 2 or Vista, you have no chance to run IE7, and adoption of it could be years in the making. Corporate environments are still wedded to Windows 2000 and home users with dialup are either running earlier versions of XP, pirated versions of XP, or even Windows 98.

Unless there's a beta 3 in production which features changes to the above, Paul Thurott may be right to suggest returning to the days of badged websites and boycotting IE7.