Just 5 years after Internet Explorer 6 was released, IE7 is now available. It’s amazing how much catch-up IE7 was able to do in this, uh, short time. It even has a swoosh in the logo now! Naturally, my instinct is to make a long series of cruel jokes at its expense. However, instead I’m going to require you to use it. Saywhat?
Now that IE7 has been sent out for auto-updating, I’m dropping support for IE6 (the most popular web browser on the internet) for most of the sites I maintain. Sites will of course still need to be legible in IE6, and some will need to look right in it - for example, the public website for my work. For sites like Altering Time or work’s private intranet, though, a super-friendly “either upgrade to IE7 or stop using IE you boron” message should work just great.
IE7 still lacks some major stuff that is available in browsers like Safari and Firefox, but IE6 is so limited that forgetting it existed will make a lot of cool new designs possible, and make debugging a lot less painful. (For example, everything from the positioniseverything Explorer house of horror was fixed!) The web gods are very happy.
Finally, three cheers for Firefox (which also recently released a new version), for kicking enough blue-e ass to force Microsoft to start de-suckifying IE.