Apologies to IE7 Users
I must confess that I have only recently made the upgrade to IE7 on my development PC. The main reason was simple laziness (I am a programmer), but it was also due to an underlying apprehension with most Microsoft technologies in general. Basically I wanted to make sure that if I installed IE7 I would still be able to run multiple versions of IE for testing purposes and not botch-up my testing environment.
The other night I attended a holiday party hosted by one of my clients and the conversation turned geeky. The client informed me that he had made the switch to IE7 and noticed some weird things happening on some of the websites he visited. This client is a regular Firefox user, but is also technically savvy enough to want to play around with other browsers to see quirks and such. So he decided to see what changes were made to IE7 and loaded up various websites to see what would break. My own site was on the list and he noticed that some of the secondary navigation was messed-up. Ouch…
So I decided to face my fears. I downloaded and installed the IE7 Update and after some odd initial glitches I was able to get everything running as smoothly as possible. Next, I downloaded the Multiple IE installer program from the TredoSoft website and was up-and-running in no time. Many thanks go out to Yousif Al Saif for compiling the installer and to Joe Maddalone for discovering and sharing his technique for running multiple versions of IE side-by-side. You guys rock!
The glitches that I was experiencing were with the secondary navigation on my website. It seems that the unordered list that I used was not behaving properly and was pretty much completely unusable. To fix the error I had to rewrite certain portions of the CSS used for the navigation list. The biggest problems stemmed from a float declaration on the list items. Once I changed the float: left; to a display: inline; (and adjusted some of the padding) the errors were fixed. The list is still not perfect, as there are now some padding anomalies to contend with, but the list is perfectly usable. It will have to be a work in progress while I find time to fix the display glitches in IE for other clients as well as myself.
In closing I feel that I must apologize to the visitors of my website who were using IE7 during this time period. Being that the secondary navigation on several key pages of the site was completely unusable, I feel that it may have seemed rather unprofessional of me and it was. I stayed up-to-date with some of the changes due to be included in the next generation of IE, but I just steered clear of actually installing the damn thing. I was one of the first 300 or so BETA testers for IE7, but never got around to doing anything with it. I honestly did not think that IE7 would change that much, but I was obviously wrong. So my apologies go out to the IE7 users of this site for not addressing the problem sooner. I have the distinct feeling that I am not alone in this matter and that we will certainly see more glitches and bugs with older designs as IE7 periodically updates. Maybe someday we will have an IE version that behaves like everyone else (such as Mozilla, Opera, and Safari) and these bugs will be a dim memory. I seriously doubt it will be any time soon so I wouldn’t suggest holding your breath.