It has always been known that Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) was going to cause challenges with designing and developing web sites once it was released. IE7 has become a literal nightmare for those of us developing web sites, not only for how the web sites themselves look and act to visitors, but also how certain proprietary web site backends act to developers like me.IE7 is not just an upgrade to IE6, but for web designers and developers, it is considered yet another web browser added to the ever expanding list of web browsers we all must make web sites work for. For example, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (Mac), and Opera are all highly used browsers on the Internet today that have their own quirks when displaying and interacting with web sites . IE5, IE6, IE7 also vary in their interaction with web sites as well. Even when writing a web page according to the strictest W3 standard, these browsers never show the exact same thing.
Since IE7 has recently been coerced on to countless computers through the use of MS’s Windows Update, IE7 has become the web developer’s nightmare especially when working with Javascript. There is a lot of money and time being spent trying to update web sites to work with this new browser. There is also many business transactions being lost because of the issues the IE7 is causing with HTML forms and Javascript.
It is becoming more and more appealing to develop Flash sites. Flash is a standard application that runs in the majority of browsers and provides all of the multimedia and interactivity of HTML, Javascript, CSS, Ajax all rolled into one. For SEO and mobile purposes two web sites would have to be produced, but that’s practically what is being done for many web sites right now.
One day there will be a standard that everyone will actually stick to that will allow web developers to produce faster and more efficient web sites. Until all are one!