IE7 spells trouble
Our company website looked good in FireFox, Opera and previous versions of IE. However in IE7 some things looked not like they should, making the whole site look very crapy - not good for a web development company.
However in my IE7 standalone it looked good, so in order to see the same as others, to be able to "debug" the site back in order I went on and downloaded the "real" IE7 update. I then had to restart the computer (after installing a web browser - sigh), opened up our site in it, and got the same mumbo-jumbo layout as others have reported.
Time to try and solve what is wrong. Open up my trusted old Dreamweaver 8, and.... "Error conecting to site". What is this? Hmmm, username and password seems to have gone awol in my Dreamweaver site setups. Hm - trying to put them in there, and get a different error. Restarts DW and username and password is yet again gone. A colleague tell me he has had the same problems with DW lately as well. I think for a second and ask if the problems came after installing IE7, he thought for a second and said that it could indeed be so. A little Googling and behold...
Installing IE7 can indeed mess up your Dreamweaver settings.
So, being a bit quicker than me, my colleague after a while reports that installing the DW 8.0.2 updater fixes the issue. For him that is. After a while I find out that while the username and password no longer disapears, I still get an error trying to connect. I try to remove and create the site again - still same error. I've always set up sites creating "FTP and RDS Server" connection, as this is what I have found is the most efficient way of working with stuff on the server. I then, after suggestion from my colleague try to set it up as a "site" with exact the same ftp information, and behold it works.
Well, now on to the task of getting our site to work in IE7 as well. I created a stylesheet for IE7 and included it like this:
<link href="/css/ie7.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->
Then it was just to try and find what could fix the problem. After a little while the following piece of code was all that was needed to fix everything:
min-height: 200px;
}
So now I "hate" IE7, not so much for breaking a layout that was from before working in all browsers. That was kind of expected. But messing up my Dreamweaver settings - now that is unforgiveable.
I find I'm becoming a curmudgeon in my old age (and fortunately, I have the luxury of not having to care what clients think anymore): While I used to test every page I created in IE, Netscape, Opera, Safari, etc., these days I build it for Firefox, check it in Opera, and assume the rest of the world doesn't need to see it right if they can't be bothered to install a decent browser. I'm not installing virus bait just to check anymore.
When I first tested my site with IE7 i was tempted to just leave it and ban users entering with IE7 from even seing my page altogether. But like you, i also design webpages and that is simply not an option. And then there was also an issue of cleartype not rendering properly In LCD monitors that MS has enabled by default.
"Microsoft, will it work today?" <-- indeed!
I hate IE7 too - we parted company today. :-))
For developing: I thought (naively) that MS might try to include some of the CSS2 compatability that looks so great in other browsers or even fix the box model problem, I'm so tired of writing extra CSS so I can "hack" IE and get it to look the same as every other browser!
In short, I used to be able to live with IE<7 for browsing, but now IE7 has put me over the edge, I HATE this browser. Microsoft seriously has to get their sh** together and get on board, they SUCK!
The only thing I like about IE7 is the "new tab" button next to the tabs. And come on, tabbed browsing - why did it take them so long?
Also,I would like to tell you about the way Microsoft try to force all user to use IE7, I just buy a new Acer lap (AP 4520G) and found that it's a stupid black box because thay can not ran my web(Its came with Vista home only) and can not convert to run with XP(have no Driver for XP).Now I turn back to my old Lap already!!