It seems the IE7 development team forgot about a very important product development concept: maintaining backward compatibility.
A good example is my website. While not 100% valid XHTML or CSS, it works fine on IE6, Firefox, Safari, Opera… But it looks like crap on IE7. During the IE7 Beta I had noticed this issue, and some of my readers even pointed this out to me. I even submitted my website to Microsoft and I has hoping those issues would have been addressed for the actual product release…
I guess IE7 is less lenient on websites and their use of HTML and CSS. But MSFT is not playing nice… especially with all the content already out there! Taking this approach is like saying “screw everyone and go my way, like it or not”. This is preposterous. Now users will download IE7, visit a website, see a broken website, and leave, and maybe never return?
This will force many website owners spend time and resources addressing this issue. In my case I use an open source weblog software, so now I have to debug other people's code, style sheets, and other to see why this behavior that only happens on IE7. At the end it might not be a big deal, but that is not the point here… the point is that IE7 should have been backwards compatible with IE6, and forcing others to spend time and resources is just not right. I see how MSFT folks will respond saying "we are processing XHTML/CSS as we are supposed to, go fix your web site". But that is not playing nice, and has an economic impact for many.
So I apologize for my website looking the way it does on IE7. I will spend the next days trying to figure out what is going on. In the meantime, please use another browser, hey, Firefox is a very good one; Firefox is my default browser. Get Firefox.
Oh, and when I installed IE7, it changed all my icons from Firefox to IE, without asking for permission – that is not nice.
ceo