March 22, 2006

Vista

The CSS community is abuzz with the news that IE7 beta is now "rendering-behavior complete" (see Dave, Roger, and Eric). Among the CSS features that have been fixed or are newly supported: floats, overflow, CSS2 selectors, min-width, max-width, min-height, and max-height. Still unsupported (and thus unsupported when IE7 launches later this year): :before and :after pseudo-elements, and outline, content, and display:table properties.

So now we know what we're getting, which is helpful, but I think it's important to remember that the IE7 hasn't launched yet, and that once it does, developers will still need to accommodate IE6 for a very long time. How long? I figure about five years. After all, when was IE5x launched? 2000? That was six years ago, and it still has something like 3% of the market.

Different sites have different audiences, and different developers set different browser support thresholds, but I'll be floored if I'm not still dealing with IE6 come, say, 2011. That's the real vista we're facing. For this reason, it's difficult to get jazzed about the improvements wrought by Microsoft's kinder, gentler team of browser developers.

Published in Browsers, CSS, WWW, Web Standards