I recently went on a tangent and downloaded Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 and found out that it seemed to render my website quite differently than the previous version. This picture details my website rendered in Firefox. I have, through many hours, managed to make Internet Explorer 6 render the same way as displayed in Firefox. This picture shows my website rendered in the new Internet Explorer. All I can say is ouch. Should I just scrap my work and restart from scratch? Thank you.
Can you post your code (html and CSS) All i know is that they have gotten ie7 to render websites a lot more efficently than ie6 ever did. Its now close enough to firefox to make testing easier. However A quick blog post by this guy pretty much sums it up instantly
Hell no. If you hasven't already, now is exactly the time to start refactoring/rewriting your site for IE7 compatability. The way in which IE7 renders pages isn't going to change massively, if at all, before the final release. Waiting for the official release would be disastrous for anything other than personal websites.
A good place to start would be to build a site without any hacks or tricks that you might usually use for ie. Basically make your site for firefox. If what is said is true, it should render the same in ie7. I hope so anyway. But i doubt it. The anoying thing is, we now have yet another browser to make compatible. ie6 might be replaced in msoft's eyes, but it is most definately not replaced by millions of people who do not want or have not updated, through choice or stubborness.
My appologies for taking so long to reply. I decided to go ahead and try to balance between Firefox, the old IE, and the new IE but that ended in failure. This is my website if you are interested in seeing the CSS and HTML. By all means I implore you to not try to get it to work; although it is much appreciated, you would most likely be wasting your time. What I may do is look at other websites (That appear to work across Firefox, IE, and IE beta) that are similiar to the structure and attributes of my website and look at their code. I do not think adding "Best viewed in Firefox" would be a fix. In my perfect world, all browsers should just copy/use Firefox's CSS interpretation.
it would be nice. I can just imagine all the developers working on ie7 kicking themselves and preparing sorry emails to all their web designer friends to say sorry for trying to reinvent the way the web is displayed.
I completely disagree with this. We don't know that these beta releases are going to be anything like the final release, nor do we know how often these betas are changing. I've got better things to be doing than running around like a slave making sure that stuff works for a bloody beta version of IE
I think you missed his point... I can garentee you that the people behind sites like ebay and amazon have already been at it for months. This isn't going to be a gradual releace, its going to go out to everyone who has automatic updates turned on. That means suddenly a whole lot of people are going to switch browsers. Now, if like you suggest, people wait for that to happen then update their websites your going to find yourself in so much of a rush and for a site, like ebay or amazon, to have even a day with a broken site could loose them a lot of money if its unexpected. Even if its simply a case of browser checking and providing a lite version of the site just in case, it does need to be done.
