The train wreck that is IE 7.0 beta 1
So Microsoft release Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 1 today. I got a chance to play with it, and I really wonder what those guys up in Redmond are smoking.
The UI
The menubar is under the toolbar and tabbar. I don’t know who the hell came up with this, but it’s one of the stupidest UI designs I’ve ever seen. Microsoft has never really embraced Fitt’s Law, but this is just retarded.
The tabbar is always visible. You can’t move tabs. The empty tab duplicates the current tab, though it’s non-obvious. You can’t move the menubar. There are no tooltips for back/forward/reload. Speaking of reload, the reload button now doubles as the stop button.
Rendering
Two IE CSS bugs were fixed; Peekaboo and Guillotine. Alpha-transparent PNG finally works without ugly hacks. Other than that, there are no changes to the rendering engine. No child selectors, attribute selectors, :before/:after/content, :hover still only works on a elements, and on and on and on.
RSS
It has a RSS reader, but it lacks Atom support. The UI for this is also retarded; feeds are added to your bookmarks, and when you click one, it shows the feed formatted in the main browser window. What’s the point of using a feed over the actual site? There’s no way to aggregate feeds, browse titles, or anything you’d expect to see in a real aggregator.
Summary
There are allegedly going to be more CSS improvements, but I doubt that the final product will be significantly different. Beta software is usually “feature-complete,” so don’t count on a DOM2 event model or the addition of currently-unsupported CSS properties. Overall, this seems like an attempt to stem the tide of users switching to Firefox, offering UI gloss instead of the fundamental changes necessary to make IE work with modern web development techinques.
Discussion