Josh (the blog)

I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.


— @joahua

IE7 Beta 2

01 Feb 2006

For:

  • Font rendering. This is how ClearType should have worked years ago.
  • Improved standards compliance. The Sunrise Family site (live) now works with IE7 near-perfectly (i.e. no more or less broken than most other browsers. On par with Firefox, worse than Opera and Safari.) Happy happy happy!
  • Zoom. Note this is SEPARATE to font sizing. But it’s still a little broken.
  • Homepage tab group isn’t an extension or extra software that needs to be added. Whenever you add a homepage, IE prompts you if you want to make this your ACTUAL homepage or add it to the opening group of tabs. Playing catch-up, sure, but a good feature nonetheless

Against:

  • Font rendering. It’d be great if it could intelligently antialias only san-serif fonts, and not process fixed-width or serifed fonts, which it invariably makes “fuzzy” rather than clearer. Also, font rendering seems to be smaller by default, which is both a good thing — it’ll force designers to make their base font sizes bigger — and a bad thing — in that, obviously, those designers that don’t conform will be subjecting users to painfully small text :-(
  • Interface. Kudos for thinking outside the square, or whatever, but I reckon people are going to struggle getting used to this. I know I will, but that’s probably because I switch between at least five different browsers daily and expect them to all behave about the same. I get confused when going between Mac and PC, mostly, because the keyboard shortcut bindings change from Apple/Start — I’m using a KVM — and control + [key] change, so Internet Explorer moving anything around is bad for me, unless everyone else follows suit.
  • Broken zoom resizes images + elements in HTML fine, but on one of my sites struggles resizing the background on the body (or maybe html?) element. Also, it doesn’t keep (all) centered sites centered once you zoom. This will obviously have to be fixed for the final release, too. I searched their newsgroup and couldn’t find anything so I posted something about it quickly. Vote for it, please :-)

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