Browser Security News

I’ve heard a bunch of people already whining about Internet Explorer 7 and how much it sucks and how it’s too little too late. I feel confident doing this in one fell swoop: these people are idealistic, out-of-touch, and at their very core, naive. IE7 is a major plus for anyone who understands the internet and networks, and especially for those who do web development. Read on for a lengthy review.

First, let’s take a peek at IE7’s often-underbilled featureset. First and foremost, IE7 has dramatically improved CSS support. No, it doesn’t pass the stupid ACID2 test, which is mostly pointless for the real world anyway, because as cool as it is, it doesn’t necessarily mean it works well on the internet, just that it fails and degrades properly. ACID2 is a discussion for another time. In the meantime, IE7 supports a lot of CSS2, even if it’s still lacking, it’s still a major improvement. You can view a list from a few months ago that includes a list of the popular bugs that have been quashed.

Secondly, and this is HUGE for me and anyone who uses Web 2.0 sites - IE7 has a native javascript XMLHttpRequest object. That means no more instanciating an ActiveX control to do AJAX programming. Now, as great as this is, a competent developer will need to write those ActiveX bits in for some time to support all the legacy browsers, and they will be around for a LONG time, since IE7 requires XPSP2, which means no non-genuine (aka "pirated") XP machines can run it, nor can Windows 2000 machines, nor can Windows 9x/Me. So you don’t ditch your try {…} catch (e) {…} catch (E) {…} code just yet. But IE7 can run AJAX natively.
IE7: A Slightly Deeper Look