First 16 hours of IE 7 RC 1

by on August 25, 2006

What's a Scoble?

Heheh, that cartoon was posted on http://blaugh.com/ yesterday.

Speaking of interesting blogging trends, this Chinese tech blog looks very interesting but I can’t read it. Major bummer. Someone yesterday asked me about the digitial divide. This divide concerns me more cause there’s tons of interesting blogging going on in Iran and China and other places in the world and I can’t really participate or link or understand.

Ahh, I see that Microsoft has first stab at Video Search (thanks to Brady Forrest’s blog over on O’Reilly).

Everyone is talking about Amazon’s EC2. David Galbraith says it’s the most amazing thing he’s seen. That’s mighty high praise. I asked Tim Bray, co-creator of XML, about it and he didn’t want to comment until he’s really had a chance to build something with it, but it certainly was on his radar screen too. It’s amazing how fast this world moves lately. 

Oh, regarding IE 7 RC 1, I loaded it up yesterday. So far I’ve had one crash with it, but like it a lot. Will I stop using Firefox because of it? No. But it seems to have taken IE users into the modern age. Will I put this on my dad’s computer? Not yet. I don’t load pre-release stuff on people’s computers anymore.

This is the first IE 7 release I have felt good about after the first few hours of using, though. So, instead of writing my own review I’ll just link over to Paul Thurrott’s and go “ditto.”

How did I get the name “Scobleizer?” after all? Well, back in OS 7 beta days I’d go around the journalism department at San Jose State University and load the latest Macintosh OS betas on everyone’s computers. People would come in the next morning and things would be different and a secretary there complained to my boss, Steve Sloan, and said “I’ve been Scobleized.”

Aside: PodTech is an official company now. How do you know that? Cause we have T-shirts!

  • A good thing with the new IE7 RC is that it is more W3C compliant than the previous version.

    However, what ticks me off is the Microsoft attitude, as we can see through this sentence taken on the msdn blog:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/08/22/712...

    quote: « The only way for us to continue to improve our standards support is to get your help in changing your sites for IE7.»

    well, why don't you guys just respect the already established standards? Then we won't have to change our sites for IE7.

    Sheesh.

    Typical. :)
  • Brem: because most sites don't actually follow the W3C standards either. The coding most webmasters practice is really crappy. How many coders have even read an XHTML book? I doubt if it's more than 5%.
  • From what I can gather off of Thurott's article IE7 may be technically "standards compliant", but once again Microsoft has used their weight to say to web designers, "you must come to us. standards? pheh."

    From the article:
    "Regarding Web site compatibility, Tony Chor, a Group Program Manager for IE, told me during a recent briefing that IE 7 offers two rendering modes. The first, called Quirks Mode (or Compatibility Mode), renders Web pages almost exactly like IE 5 and IE 6; this is the mode that IE 7 operates in by default due to the millions of internal and public Web sites around the world that rely on particular IE behavior. The second mode, called Standards Mode (or Strict Mode) is what Chor calls "our best standards-based implementation." To access this mode, Web sites need to add a special !DOCTYPE tag to the top of their HTML files."

    So basically rather than render standards compliant website by friggin' default, web designers basically have to tell IE7 to really, please, render my standards compliant site correctly.

    And Scoble, just because many people don't use XHTML/CSS correctly when they create websites isn't an excuse. They are web -standards- for a reason, which many professional web designers use day in and day out to make a living.
  • Scoble,

    Let me in on your secret of knowing so many things which are going on at the same time. I will give you (half) of my soul.

    Regds
    Sarang
  • Sarang: Skype. Phone. Email. Car. I use them all to learn the trends and build connections between people who build the stuff we all use.
  • @Brem: I think that is probably referring to the many non standards comliant sites that were written with IE in mind, not to mention all the sites with browser sniffing and what not.

    And it's not an "attitude" it's a fact. IE developers are people too and when they say that it isn't some random BS.
  • Hey Robert, speaking of Microsoft. Why does your RSS feed still show this reference to Microsoft in the Title?


    Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger
    http://scobleizer.wordpress.com

    It appears to still show you as "Microsoft's Geek Blogger"
    "
    I tend to think Scobleizer - Geek Blogger, Period"
  • what ticks me off is that pompous attitude of telling other what to do. If anything, why doesn't this website I referenced to tell people to read xhtml books and render their websites w3c compliant? No. Instead, they say: make sure they work for IE7.

    Well, if it's news to the IE7 team, Safari is already pretty W3C compliant and Firefox is pretty darn good at it too. IE7 should have been compliant by now. This is to show how slow moving Microsoft has become. Innovation? no. Renovation. :)
  • If developers (being amateur or pro) leave blood in their hands to fix all the IE bugs, I ask myself why they will not fix their site to be standard compliant? Whats the difference coding well instead writting thosen hacks?
  • LayZ
    Scoble, can you point us to the web site you built based on the vast tomes of web programming you've consumed? Thanks!
  • Larry, all sites should define a DOCTYPE DTD (and yes, I know that my blog doesn't yet - it's being worked on). The DTD affects how all browsers render pages, and not just IE.

    What surprises me is that Thurrott didn't know about Quirks and Standards mode before. Let's take a quick look at how Winsupersite is coded...

    /*


    Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: Internet Explorer 7.0 Release Candidate 1 Review


    */

    OK, Paul's using Webside story, but he needs to fix that.
  • Gah, let's try again, as angle bracket tags get scobleized off the comments...


    {html}
    {head}
    {meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"}
    {title}Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: Internet Explorer 7.0 Release Candidate 1 Review{/title}
    {link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles/supersite2003.css"}
    {/head}
  • Christopher Coulter
    Tinkered. Wow, this is a great release, for late 2001...

    IE 7 RC RVW (Rip Van Winkle).
  • Well I guess I got Scobleized After you wrote that article about Blog camp
  • LayZ
    Scoble said:

    "How did I get the name “Scobleizer?” after all? Well, back in OS 7 beta days I’d go around the journalism department at San Jose State University and load the latest Macintosh OS betas on everyone’s computers. People would come in the next morning and things would be different and a secretary there complained to my boss, Steve Sloan, and said “I’ve been Scobleized.”


    Jesus, dude! AGAIN with the summer re-runs?

    http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/07/21/cody...

    So, you are now so devoid of original thought you have to replay your own posts?

    What's worse? Pulling down posts, or re-running old ones?
  • LayZ: I have more than 10,000 new readers here since early summer, according to my logs. So, excuse me for repeating myself.
  • Christian Flury
    Hi,

    Adapted my css to IE7 last night (for a website that's not ready yet, therefore no link), and I was relieved it was quite easy even for a hobbyist like me. I had one standards-compliant stylesheet for Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, NS, etc. and one that was adjusted for IE6 (imported with conditional comments), and I could basically take a mixture of the two to make it work in IE7 which was quite an easy process.

    I noticed that some things such as min- and max- work correctly now, as well as the overflow behaviour, whereas absolute positioning or widths specified relatively to the parent element behave exactly as in IE6 and require the same work-arounds - so at least, once you have a layout working in both IE6 and the major proper browsers, IE7's behaviour is pretty predictable.

    In response to #3, it would be nonsensical to switch to standards-compliant mode in the absence of a doctype definition, since a page without a doctype defintion is not standards-compliant anyway, and no other major browser would do that either.

    To sum it up, IMO IE7 is still far from on par with Firefox or Opera, but at least it's not as much of a pain in the neck as IE6. I also agree with comment #8 that under these circumstances, whilst I am more than pleased finally to detect some progress, it is utterly pathetic how MS goes around lecturing people about web standards (such as including the doctype header) which have been common knowledge for years - except in Redmond, it appears.

    But still, I am happy; I had been expecting the worst from IE7 and was positively surprised.
  • LayZ
    @18 is your search function broken?
  • LayZ
    I mean, buy your logic, when newspapers and magazines get new subscribers they should re-run old stories and columns as well.

    I know of very few "credible" bloggers that feel the need to rerun posts, almost verbatim. But, hey, if that's what it takes to be an "A lister"....
  • h3
    Why should we code XHTML if IE7 renders it as HTML even in strict mode (instead of XML) ? They did not implement the "application/xhtml+xml" mime-type because it would be "to complicated".. they say.

    Yeah sure, XHTML is rocket science and they might not have enough money yet to get it done. Or maybe they are note smart enough.. Enough sarcasms, I'm just frustated to see how they takes us for retards.

    forgive my english, I speak french..
  • h3, as I see it, there's little practical reason to use XHTML. The most popular browser doesn't support it at all and at least two others just treat as plain HTML. That means absolutely no benefit: no namespaces, no well-formedness requirement, nada.

    The benefits of using it are that your markup will be cleaner (use a validator and content negotiation for best results) and it's easier to parse, meaning you'll be able to use good XML tools, XSLT stylesheets, and ad-hoc PHP scripts to manipulate it.

    I, for one, applaud Microsoft for not half-heartedly implementing XHTML.
  • h3
    I agree that they made a good thing in not implement something that is alf finished, something they are usually god at..

    On the other hand, from what I understood, we'll have to wait until ie8 to finally get any real benefits from using web standards. Which means how much time ? that's the question. My bet is aroud late 2009, but given the release rate i think it's quite optimistic.

    imho, ie7 is nothing more than ie6 skinned with features ripped off from other browsers, a real deception. Oh.. and two thumbs up for implementing "some" standards that should have been long time ago.
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