[rock_lobsta]

'Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped.'

Coming from Thurrott, whom I generally consider to be a Microsoft shill, this is a big condemnation of IE7. He has gotten progressively more critical of MS since Vista's development problems.

[gondramB]

>>IE 7.0 Technical Changes Leave Web Developers, Users in the Lurch<<

Gosh, I hope it doesn't leave us Firefox users in the lurch...

[angkor]

I've been trying to avoid IE forever, with Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, Firefox, and even Maxthon (Maxthon was/is a "development partner" of MS).

But you have to keep it around, because there are a few sites that demand it, and a few apps that use IE DLL's and rendering (the excellent SharpReader RSS reader). So you're stuck.

95 percent of all sites seem to do well with Firefox and Opera.

[KoRn]

ping

[Turbopilot]

IE is one thing Microsoft has done a really bad job with lately, and it's only apparent because of how good a product Firefox is. Tabbed browsing in and of itself is one of those features that, once you've used it, you can't understand how you ever used a computer without it. And extensions that let you customize the browser to your tastes are brillant - to say nothing of the fact that Firefox opens and loads pages faster, and takes up less HD space. Opera has the best-looking interface, but is slightly slower and there aren't nearly as many extensions available.

For me to switch from IE, I had to see something not just different or as good, but better - and I did. I've completely switched to Firefox, and other than Windows Update itself I don't seem to run across any incompatible web sites. I now consider Firefox to be an essential part of a properly configured computer. To get me to switch back, IE must have everything Firefox does, and then be better still - right not it looks like IE7 is just going to try to be "as good" (or "almost as good") as Firefox, and that won't cut it for me or most other people.

[SlowBoat407]

As long as IE is still the standard to which major institutions (banks, credit cards, etc) design their websites for interactivity, we're all stuck. I could not use Firefox or Safari to do online bill payments until just recently. Before then, I had to keep a copy of IE on my computer solely for that purpose.

[MikefromOhio]

well of COURSE it's going to be jacked up.

It's from Micro$$$$$$$$$$$$$$oft

[supercat]

Microsoft blames backward-compatibility problems for the stalemate over true Web standards compatibility.

Simple solution: if the header of a document says it uses a new version of the standards, process it according to the new standards. If not, process it the old way.

What's the problem?

[holymoly]

and Opera 8 are both worth considering as well

The most recent version of Opera is 9.01. It reportedly passes the Acid2 test.

[ShadowAce]

[garyhope]

I'm currently using IE 7 Beta test ver 3.

I like the tab feature, otherwise I don't know if I can tell the difference, but then I'm no software whiz. The history button seems to have disappeared.

[InterceptPoint]

IMHO: IE7 Beta 3 is Terrific.

You can knock it you like but the tabbed browsing implementation is much better than the Firefox original and the integrated RSS is great. I give Firefox a look occasionally and just don't see anything there that is all that special except the tabbed browsing and since IE7 handles that so nicely I think I'm just going to stick with Microsoft.

[dfwgator]

We've been doing a lot of stuff with AJAX on our projects, I hope IE7 doesn't mess this up.