CSS and IE7: Is there any hope?

Note: This is merely a review (albeit a negative one) regarding IE7 and where IE7 is taking misguided users next.

As a web designer/developer, you should generally care about how your pages look in the most popular browsers. With Internet Explorer controlling the major share of the market (~9-11%), testing sites in Internet Explorer are a must. Since IE7 beta was released to the general public, I feel that it is important to test sites in this browser as well.

Why, you ask, its only in beta and IE7 has less of a share than Firefox? Since IE controls such an immense market share, it is important to support the next major release as soon as possible.

IE7 had been waiting in the wings for a while. With the advent of tabbed browsing, integrated RSS feeds and phishing filters, IE7 looked very promising. Everything went as planned, except for one thing:

CSS Support

I beta tested IE7, and was very glad withthe features that were included with the browser. Ever since I used Firebird/Firefox, I’ve loved the tabbed browing feature. But for web developers, the lack in compliance of (W3C) CSS standards, are improved - but only for the most requested bugs.

According to the IE7 CSS Poll, CSS support within CSS needs (significant) improvement. Reading through the comments left by fellow MSDN Channel9 Members, I came across one member (DigitalDud) that got my point across, better than I could have done it.

It makes more sense for the IE team to focus on features of CSS that are most useful to web developers like fixed positioning. Implementing the entire recommendation just to say you did is kind of silly especially since it’s full of errata anyway.

Not only is that very important for web developers, but in most cases important to the end users as well. If web developers don’t fully “hack” their CSS to comply with the stubbornness of IE, the end user is going to be affected. After digging around some more, I also came across a write up he did regarding IE’s CSS Support.

I know the IE team is simply responding to user feedback in adding additional CSS support but I don’t think it’s wise to support CSS just to say you support standards. Fix bugs, but don’t bother with new features.

Relating this comment back to his original comment that appeared earlier in this post, fixing the main bugs (lacking CSS support) is definitely more important to web developers (who are providing the content that IE thrives on), than introducing end-user options like tabbed browsing. Can I blame Microsoft for releasing a glass-like, tabbed browser that includes an RSS reader?

Certainly not, but Microsoft cannot forget that first and foremost - it is a web browser and holding the market share doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making the best product.

So what’s ahead for IE and CSS. One thing - They’ve started to listen to user feedback and have started to fix limited bugs based on that feedback. Just like you’d write to your governmenet representative, if you’re tired of bugs in IE (especially the lack of CSS support), let them know.