Lemon Foundation

With the rise and rise of Firefox as the industries darling web browser, Microsoft has been hard at work on their latest release of Internet Explorer, IE7, aimed at maintaining the MSFT consumer browser dominance.  The recent release of the latest version of Firefox (version 2 – called FF2) might even get you thinking that there was a race on, so we’ve written this to give you some more info and analyse what it means for you.

So what does it mean for the average user of the interweb?
If you’re a typical web user then for the most part you probably won’t notice much at all, but there is a chance that your own site might not look the same as it did in previous versions of IE.  This is primarily because Microsoft has worked hard to fix bugs in IE6, which web developers had in turn created hacks for to make things work across browsers, so those self same hacks that are meant for good might actually do more harm than good.  If you’re using IE7 that is. 

Of course, beyond the basics this might be important to you so we’re going to go through this in a bit more detail:
There are some positives
IE7 is more compliant with current web standards.
IE7 has fixed many CSS issues that were troublesome and required hacks.

And a few negatives
Sites that rely on CSS for presentational positioning may cause issues, with many websites looking broken as a result of the new IE7 compliance.
All hacks used by developers to fix IE6 bugs will cause issues for IE7.
IE7 may still be slower then FF2 in some instances.
 
As usual, Zeldman has something to say that might also be worth reading if you’re more interested in the technical bits and bobs.

The take home is that most people have Windows Update set to update automagically, which should update their browser version to IE7, which means that if you’re worried about your site looking a little wonky for those users, and your target market is indeed largely made up of IE users, then it’s definitely worth doing something about.

Simply updating to IE7 and checking your website for problems yourself is an obvious thing to do, but if you’re not up for that then contacting your web agency about potential problems your website might have is the next best idea.  If you’re a large corporate and you’re serving web pages to lots of people, then it’s probably better to do it sooner rather than later!!