Does Internet Explorer really progress ?

Guillaume Mouron — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 21:29:00 +0200

As I am currently creating my homepage (not an easy task), I am running some tests on Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 and already having a bad feeling ...

So that was the big piece of news somewhere around 1 year and a half ago ...
Microsoft is working on a brand new version of Internet Explorer ...

So the purpose here is not to talk about the UI evolutions (TABS) but the CSS, Javascript and XHTML support (or standard compliance hum ...). Well, and also on the whole enhanced security thing with an "event" that occured yesterday ...

So, as already written in the excerpt, I am building my homepage, that will be available soon (at least I hope so :)).
And I wanted to put some transparency on my page ... Internet explorer has been handling html elements transparency for a long time with, of course, a proprietary instruction filter:alpha(opacity=number) or filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=number) where number is between 0 and 100.

But things have changed since that time ... Mozilla and firefox supported it through the -moz-opacity:number instruction with number between 0 and 1. And Konqueror and Safari through -khtml-opacity:number with number between 0 and 1.
Since then, it has been introduced into CSS 3 specifications (still working draft though) ... And now Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Safari support opacity:number, number between 0 and 1. Konqueror is supposed to but I can't make it work in the 3.5.1 version, even with the old -khtml-opacity property. See here for some other people being confronted to this problem ...

So as you could probably guess, IE7 beta 3 does not support the opacity property. You have to use their own filter property, which, of course, is not standard and gives you a validator error
So ok, I'm probably a bad programmer compared to those working on IE7, building a parser is not an easy thing (I still remember this compilation project ;)) but would it be THAT difficult to catch the opacity line, retrieve the number, multiply it by 100 and call the SAME function used with their filter thing ?

So that was the first point with this opacity thing ... But as we say in France un malheur n'arrive jamais seul (I don't know if there is a real translation but literally and poorly translated it would be a misfortune never happens alone hum ...). So Microsoft has enhanced the security within their browser (or at least, that's what they pretend) and you can't execute ActiveX applets or javascripts if you're not on a trusted site or you don't specifically allow the page to do so.
And that's the problem here. The filter property within the css is, appearantly, handled in a way or another by an ActiveX function. So when you include it in you css file, Internet Explorer prevents it from being executed (so no transparency) and displays a warning message if you want or don't want to execute ActiveX or script content !!

So, as you can see, I'm not convinced by IE7, at least with a ''web developper" point of view, who wants to make some cross-browser websites ... and there are still some differences in interpretation of "pure" xhtml, even if some progresses have been made ... The thing I really hope is that they won't release IE 7 and then do nothing for another 2 or 3 or 4 years ... They need to continue improving their browser because firefox, opera or safari are becoming more and more popular, and support more and more things ...

Some links :
the stylesheet (only the filter part)
the official IE7 blog

PS : Thanks to Nicolas for his corrections and YES I use the word "so" too much

GMo Blog - IE7

Does Internet Explorer really progress ?