Indirect Manipulation

Been really swamped of late, hence my lack of posts. Among the many things occupying my time is a daily struggle with Internet Explorer 7. With all apologies to the Microsoft fans out there, IE7 really misses the mark.

I will say that there are some nice features to IE7. The tabbed interface is a long overdue addition, and I like that the Favorites can be displayed as a single pinned or floating bar. The RSS integration is reportedly much better than that of Firefox, and the IE team appears to have made an effort to create a more extensible browser application with the use of its add-on manager.

The problem I have with IE7 is twofold. First: the development team, in an effort to achieve innovation, has eliminated UI browser paradigms to which users are accustomed. The top menus are gone, their contents buried behind crytpic icons. The primary button glyphs are in weird places, particularly the “refresh” button (if you can recognize its functionality from topical inspection). I just don’t understand the value of creating change for its own sake, which I fear is what MS has done.

Second: the flawed box model of IE7 tends to wreak havoc with CSS components, making Ajax very tricky business. I noticed issues even compared to earlier versions of Internet Explorer. My stylesheets would be roughly a third the file size if I didn’t have to endlessly hack and kluge just to make IE7 play nice.

On top of all that, you have the US Federal Government deciding not to switch over to Vista. This decision was made due to documented compatibility issues and the expected high cost of upgrading existing equipment. The two agencies affected include The Department of Transportation (DOT) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); DOT is going so far as to block any computers with Vista installed from accessing their network.

On a more positive note, great article on Boxes and Arrows regarding content analysis and inventory. And according to a recent SXSW panel, the browser wars are heating up.

Go back to the Indirect Manipulation home page.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 7:42 pm and is filed under The Romance of CSS, Uncle Dom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.