"microsoft" in Weblog

So IE7 has finally been released and the inevitable security exploits have already started surfacing. I’m very glad to see it, to be honest. The new CSS support is very welcome, even if it is playing catchup to the rest of the field.

And I’ve got it running standalone too. Jon Galloway’s IE7 Standalone works just fine with a single change to the ‘IE7 Standalone Setup.bat’ file.

Download IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe from Microsoft, making sure you save it instead of running it. Follow all Jon’s instructions but before running ‘IE7 Standalone Setup.bat’ change: IE7RC1-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe /extract:Installation /quiet to IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe /extract:Installation /quiet.

That’s it. All done. Continue following Jon’s instructions and it should all just work.

We got an email sent to Content with Style from one of the IE7 development guys last week warning us that the site was broken in the forthcoming browser. From what I’d heard I was under the impression that the current Beta 2 was not yet ready for testing but apparently I got the wrong end of the stick. the bulk of the work is done and no more major changes are planned. I’d been dreading the moment I had to go through all my old sites and start checking them in IE7. I was really afraid that everything would be screwed…

Yesterday I downloaded the beta install from Microsoft and, following Jon Galloway’s instructions, got it hooked up to his marvelous launch script, slightly customised to keep conditional comments working in my other IE standalones. Everything worked perfectly.

I was pretty much horrified when I started looking through my sites though. My fears appeared to be justified - donotremove, Content with Style and Wordtracker, were all over the place. I read Malarkey’s summary of the clearfix issues a couple of weeks back but I hadn’t really been paying attention. All I could remember was that clearfix was somehow broken and hasLayout had something to do with it… Off I toddled to do some reading.

So, to force elements to contain their floats in IE7 you need to somehow set their hasLayout property to true. Not so bad. This can be done a few ways, with overflow: auto and zoom: 1 being the most straightforward.

I’ve used Easy Clearing on every site I’ve done in the last couple of years. All my structural blocks have the .clearfix class on them. The one I have closest to hand is donotremove so as a test run I changed its conditional comments to feed my ie-standards.css file to IE7 as well as IE6 and added:

.clearfix {
    zoom: 1;
}

Guess what? The problems have all gone. The site looks exactly as I intended. It took me about 30 seconds…

So, Google vs Microsoft then? It sounds like this is going to be more interesting than I was expecting… The leader in findability and online advertising vs the leader in consumer platforms.

While I was setting up my brother’s computer a couple of weeks ago I had to unplug my desktop from my home network… Until that point I hadn’t really noticed how little use I have for a computer without the internet. I reckon that about 80% of the time I spend at my computer relies on an internet connection. Now I come to think of it, the ease with which I adjusted to my iBook bears testimony to this as well. Once I had my mail and internet connection set up, with a bit of synchronisation here and there, I felt at home.

So for me, and probably many others, useful computing depends on the internet. All I need is a few key apps and I can work on any platform…

My money’s on Google.

With everything that’s going on with Google at the moment it’s worth revisiting EPIC: “It’s the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?” Now read The Google File System and Welcome to the Google Twilight Zone…

Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, who put together the EPIC movie, appear to have been pretty much bang on with their predictions. The idea of the Google Grid is facinating and entirely plausible… Could Google be the new Microsoft? Is Bill Gates worried?

Rather unexpectedly Microsoft have just announced that they WILL be releasing IE7 separately from Longhorn. That’s a turnup for the books! It looks like Firefox is having it’s desired effect… I’m a little nervous about what bugs they’ll choose to fix but I’m also quite excited about possible feature additions. Surely they won’t fix the * html bug but not sort out their rendering inconsistencies… will they? Please please please sort out PNG support though…

My only real reservation about the whole thing is that they’ve decided to make the upgrade available only to XP SP2 users, about half of the Windows population. That means that we’re definitely still going to have to code for IE5 and IE6, with no option of an upgrade for those folk. Apart from Firefox, of course!

I’ve not played this properly yet but ICS’ UA-Chess game looks like it could be pretty interesting. It’s been designed to work with Microsoft’s IE Speech Add-on along with a host of other accessibility-related input devices. Accessbile Flash has been around for a while but this is the first time I’ve really seen it used…