With its overwhelming share of the browser market, Microsoft's IE cannot be ignored. While the final version of IE7 will be released later this year, Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1 is now publicly available. This release gives you the opportunity to be the first to discover application issues you encounter when viewing web pages with this new browser.
Let's take a brief look at IE7. I mainly emphasize areas and features that may cause problems for developers, as well as tools that facilitate application development.
Keep up with the competition
Mozilla's Firefox undoubtedly put pressure on Microsoft to produce an improved browser. A quick look at IE7's interface yields plenty of examples, particularly of features like the new tabbed interface, support for RSS, expanded viewing areas, and enhanced anti-spyware tools. Especially from a user's perspective, these improvements greatly enhance the functionality of the browser; but there are many other improvements that may directly affect your daily WEB development work.
standard
The web development community has been clamoring for IE to support a wider range of standards for some time. IE7 is not fully compatible with CSS 2.1, but it fixes some bugs in IE6. This situation is apparently caused by its failure to pass the Acid2 browser compatibility test developed by the Web Standards Project.
Microsoft blames backward compatibility issues for its inability to provide true web standards compatibility. Indeed, developers applying old, outdated web development techniques are blamed for the lack of real standards supported by IE7; indeed, the web development community believes that CSS should be used when developing web-based interfaces, but Microsoft disagrees.
There are too many CSS improvements and bug fixes in IE7 to list in this article, but MSDN has already covered them in detail. It provides CSS improvements and CSS problems you may encounter in IE7.
development tools
Support for standards seems to be one area where IE7 is lacking, but at first glance, the tools it provides to assist development are quite good. Below we briefly summarize the development tools in IE7.
Application Compatibility Toolbox : Helps developers view IE7 application compatibility logs. It also provides a lot of information about IE7, listing known problems, and ways to deal with problems that may occur.
Symbol Detector : Locate special strings in web pages and reference files. Microsoft promotes it as a powerful tool for locating CSS hacks that are no longer supported by IE7 (CSS hack refers to the special CSS definition techniques we use in order to be compatible with various browsers.).
Developer Toolbar : Includes tools for operating and fixing network problems.
Fiddler : This is an HTTP debugging proxy that logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. It is installed as a separate application through the IE7 toolbar.
Script Debugger : Allows you to debug client and server side scripts. (This tool is actually only available today. I use it frequently to locate client-side JavaScript errors.)
User Agent String Utility : Allows you to manipulate the user agent string that identifies the browser you are using when browsing websites. This tool allows you to change settings and identify any websites that are blocking IE7 (and report them to Microsoft.)