Isolationism

The final release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 is now available as a “free download” from Microsoft’s site as of tonight.

As a web designer who is (dramatically) impacted by this release I am of two minds. Disclosure: I am a Firefox user and have been for years, now—but as any UI designer knows, your preference has nothing to do with what you do all day long.

That is to say, this release impacts my bottom line, so obviously I have an opinion. I am naturally grateful that Microsoft has finally released a significant update to their browser product after 5 years’ hiatus (besides critical security patches), and with it, some significant upgrades. Most notably:

• Fixes to some (but not all) long-standing, MSIE-only CSS rendering bugs
• PNG alpha-transparency support
• Improved CSS Level 2 selector support (again, still a far cry from most other browsers, but better than it was)

With everything being so widely improved, you might wonder what designers have to complain about:

• Mixed environments: Unline most other browsers (where users can more easily/readily update their browser themselves, or have the software do it on its own), MSIE is a support nightmare. If you think MSIE 6 is old, try MSIE 5.5 support on for size; a lot of people still use it. If you do any work for the government, you know they’re using software from last decade (”Because we’ve worked out all the bugs,” they argue. Yeah, right. If MS isn’t even supporting Windows XP SP1 anymore, guess how secure your department of 386’s running Windows 98 and MSIE 5.5 are.)
• Yet Another Style Sheet: If you support different browsers without using hacks, you’re creating multiple style sheets, one to support each browser (and with MSIE, one to support each version of the browser, because 5, 5.5, 6, and 7 all render the same page/css differently). More to debug, more to maintain. Firefox, by comparison, has hardly changed rendered appearance at all since before the whole Firebird/Firefox project began, with a couple very minor exceptions (such as legend element rendering restrictions introduced in Firefox 1.5).
  To be fair, Opera has changed more dramatically between major version revisions: but those have almost always been a steady progression toward standards compliance (after all, Opera 9 was the second browser to pass the Acid2 test, whereas doing so isn’t even on Mozilla’s road map for the time being).
• Still Dominating the Market: There are a lot of reasons why any single product dominating their market with over 85% of the market share is a bad thing—the proof is in the pudding; look at the last time they bothered to innovate in browser design let alone patch their own software’s abominable shortcomings. But there’s lots more reasons to dislike the possibility of MSIE regaining market share even if you’re not one of the sheep who will be adopting it, if you have to live and work in a world full of them.

Don’t let me stop you from downloading and installing a copy; who knows, maybe it will be successful in perpetuating itself (or in advancing the cause of its competitors). Be aware that if you have your PC set to automatically download and install updates, you will be automatically upgraded to IE7 on November’s ‘Patch Tuesday’, which falls on the 14th—Microsoft considers the software a significant enhancement to functionality and security, so you won’t be prompted to install (or not) if you aren’t already for other security updates.