IE7B2P (latest build) geekery.
So I quickly grab a copy of the latest “layout-complete” build of IE7 Beta 2 Preview the moment I read about it. And “layout-complete” means no changes will be made to the rendering engine of IE7 till the final release and it’s time to start testing if sites will work in IE7 or break with this release.
While downloading it, I was thinking of what I should do with it once I’m done with the installation and all. It didn’t take long for the aforementioned to complete and I found myself browsing through properly-built standards-oriented sites, alt-tabing between IE7B2P, Firefox and sometimes, IE6.
First site I went to, was of course my dumpsite. It came as no surprise that my dumpsite rendered pixel-perfect on this new toy because I use mostly cheapskate CSS1 properties, and I’d already done so with the previous build and nothing went wrong. (It’s worth noting that at time of testing, IE7 seems to have some problems with displaying my graffiti which I suspect is due to cache problems. More about this when alpha 3 is out though.)
Next, I browsed through most of the people in my blogrolls. I picked those not hosted on WordPress though, and targetted most self-hosted blogs and also the popular blogspot.com users (which Eric has alot on his blogrolls, nice). You see, most (Singaporeans) blogspot users are notorious for using themes/skins with ugly (javascript) hacks coupled with CSS property display to do none; or block; to achieve the result of showing only a section of a page at a time. Though I have no qualms with such techniques, most of the pages usually become a victim of improperly nested HTML tags when the downloaders add in their own stuffs, and soon disaster will happen when viewed in modern browsers like Firefox or Opera.
Sadly, most of the sites I found displayed rather well in both IE6/7 and Firefox and the only person who had always whined about Firefox not displaying her blogspot site properly has moved on to WordPress.com; I can’t remember her previous blogspot URL now. So if you have any contributions that don’t display well in Firefox but do so in IE6, please let me know by comments, IRC, msn or anything.
Then I proceeded to viewing my other sites. I began with the site that broke in the previous build — Sterling Project. And sure enough, it’s still broken and I wonder why since it displays properly in Firefox and it was worked around for IE6 with conditional comments instead of the * html hack.
Next was the TP site that broke with a horizontal scrollbar, is now rendering perfectly ‘cept with the padding on the menus, but even that is easily fixed when I moved the * html hacks to conditional comments, I think. We’ll see.
The Asian Aerospace 2004 (design) mock-up site that I’ve made up for the sake of practising for WSS now works (almost) perfect in IE7 except for some “peekaboo”-alike symptons. No, don’t even try it with IE6 please.
And the last site that I can think of, that isn’t done by me is CSS Zen Garden: Gemination. I don’t need to screen capture this because you can view them yourself. Just load IE6 and Firefox with that page and you can tell why. Maybe you’ll just think they’re different pages, but they are really the same page with the same stylesheet, except using advanced CSS2.1 selectors to morph the site into a gem for modern browsers (and IE6 is not). Enjoy.
I think that’s all for now till I have more time to mess around with the CSS-power in IE7. It rocks now if you compare it to IE6, and that means in time to come, there will be lesser (read: not none) headache for web designers to cope with. And that in my book, is a good sign. So Microsoft, a little overdue update, but definitely a good one.