ie7

Two

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I know I’m a little behind the times here. I was aware of this about five minutes after it happened, but I haven’t had time to blog about it until tonight. Firefox 2 was officially released over a week ago.

To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed with this release. Sure, it has a slick new look and some new bells and whistles (e.g., in-line spell check, session restore, and anti-phishing), but it’s lacking in one area that makes all the difference for me: XML feed support. To be fair, it’s got better support for feeds than Firefox 1.5, but this is one area where I’m sad to say Internet Explorer 7 is winning.

Lifehacker already voiced a few of my complaints about Firefox 2’s feed support (or lack thereof), but one thing they failed to mention is that Firefox 2 has poor support for third-party feed readers. I use Mozilla Thunderbird to manage my feeds, and, paradoxically, Firefox can’t add feed subscriptions to Thunderbird. This bug really should’ve been a version 2 release blocker, but somehow it sailed right through without being noticed. Hopefully they’ll fix this bug in a 2.0.1 release or something soon.

Other than that (and a minor unsettledness about the new look), I do love the browser and recommend that everyone download it as soon as possible. Happy browsing!

Seven

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I’m writing this entry in Internet Explorer 7. Let me back up—I’m not sure you heard me correctly. I’m not writing this in Internet Explorer 7 Beta or even in the Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate. I’m writing this post using the official release of Internet Explorer 7. The official release announcement was made this afternoon on IEBlog.

You can download Internet Explorer 7 now if you’d like, or if you’re not anxious you can wait a few weeks, as the new browser will be released as a high-priority automatic Windows update.

I for one am impressed with the new product and can whole-heartedly recommend it to everyone. As far as web standards support is concerned, I don’t think IE7 hits the nail quite on the head, but it’s a far cry closer than IE6 ever was. I have to give credit where credit is due, and the Internet Explorer team has earned my praise for taking huge strides in the right direction.

Blah blah blah

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A few more notes about the new design, and then I’ll stop yakking about it; I promise. I’ve now tested the site in Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 (rc1), Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2 (rc2), Opera 9, and Safari 1.2. It passes with flying colors in all browsers, with the exception of IE6, where it doesn’t actually look half bad—the layout itself is fine but the PNG images puke big bluish blocks all over where they should be transparent. Sometime down the road I may decide to replace all the PNGs with something else in IE6 (using conditional comments or some other such hack), but IE7 is coming this month and will be a critical automatic update, so I’m not going to sweat about it too much.

Unbeknownst to me, the new design wasn’t at first valid XHTML and CSS. I took care of that this morning by properly closing a few <li> tags, fixing a few tag IDs, properly enclosing a couple of comment form elements inside a block level element, and fixing a few malformed CSS statements.

Last but not least, I should mention that the new design uses a couple of new fonts: Cambria and Calibri. Microsoft is releasing six new fonts with Windows Vista and many people (myself included) are hoping they become widely distributed enough to use them in web pages. If you don’t have these fonts, the new design properly degrades to using Georgia and Trebuchet MS instead, which I think looks pretty good, so you’re not missing out on much. To get the full effect, however, I recommend you download the new fonts if you can. They have been released unofficially to the public in the Vista betas and can be found on the web with a little effort.

Facelift

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The new design looks downright crappy in Internet Explorer 7 and even worse in Internet Explorer 6, but I’m working on that. Actually, I may not attempt to make it compatible with IE6 at all, preferring visitors upgrade to IE7. I can get away with that because I’m not trying to please anybody or make any money here.

I’ve got my del.icio.us bookmarks populating as regular entries and I’m working on getting my Flickr photosets to do the same. Toward that end, the Flickr Photo Album for WordPress plugin looks promising. I’m still working on a way to bring all my Foundation content over here. That’s going to be more complicated than I hoped. I may simply have to hold out for WordPress 2.1, which is supposed to have a fancy new export/import feature.

Anyway, all this to say that a lot of stuff is broken right now. Hold on to your shorts.

Update: I’ve managed to get the site looking good in Internet Explorer 7 with only minor tweaks to the code. Amazingly, it didn’t require any IE conditional comments (or any other hacks for that matter). The exact same code is working in Firefox, Opera, and IE7, and all three browsers actually render the page as intended. This has got to be one for the record books.