For those with their head in the sand the past few days, initial IE7 betas are out and the news from those who have gotten it and installed are mixed as anticipated.
Dave wins the award for best write up for the web builder on the go with this post from yesterday, getting right to the point and outlining some good additions (PNG support), some shortcomings (little change in CSS) and some ideas of what to look for in upcoming betas.
So what about the rendering? Things have changed, but obviously we were promised only very little for a reason — nothing much has been fixed. Yes, now we have PNG transparency. (compare Panic’s Audion Faces page in IE6 and IE7) Yes, the Peekaboo and Guillotine bugs appear to have been addressed. Though without having had a chance to test either very comprehensively, I’ll hold off on saying they’ve actually been fixed just yet.Other than that? After running through Position Is Everything’s “Explorer Exposed” omnibus, it seems to me that the list of outstanding IE bugs remains long. Line-height bug? Not fixed. Border chaos? Chaotic as ever. Italic overflows? Still buggy. Doubled float margin? Nope. 3px jog? Nuh-uh. Escaping floats? No way.
And also includes this important piece of information from the official IE Blog (emphasis mine):
The beta versions of Windows Vista and IE7 that have just released should be interesting to developers and IT professionals. For this reason, the beta is available to MSDN subscribers and a pretty small set of pre-enrolled beta test participants. Our goal is to get feedback from this group, do a bunch more work around quality (performance, security, reliability, etc.) and some features (e.g. additional standards support beyond what’s in beta 1, additional functionality around tabs and RSS, etc.), and release Beta 2 much more broadly.
Molly also has a good write up if you’re looking looking for more.
