Internet Explorer Strikes Again!
This week at Mix06 Microsoft announced the release of Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2. Anticipating wide spread adaption when it goes live, I’ve been testing the IE 7 betas against Web Services flagship project, the portal.
Cosmetically, things look good with IE7. Part of that is because we’re not using too may fancy CSS layout techniques. However, one concern that has cropped up is that the top navigation in the portal either isn’t clickable(in the production environment) and occasionally doesn’t appear (in development environment). That could be a big problem because if this isn’t addressed in IE7 development or is actually due to our current CSS techniques, users will have a much harder time of getting to the appropriate page.
At this point I’m not too concerned since it’s still in Beta. However, as the time grows closer to the final release I’ll need to revisit and see if things have improved simply because IE has majority of the market share. Coupled with it’s tight integration in Windows, if users start to upgrade, presumably it will be more difficult to downgrade, unlike Firefox or Opera.
The question in my mind is how quickly will the university adapt IE7 as an “officially supported browser”?