More Microsoft madness... 

So I downloaded the 'Release Candidate' of Microsoft Internet Explorer version 7 (that's what 'RC' stands for in the software world) to see if they fixed any of the long standing CSS quirks and anomolies.

The first thing to report is that the installation failed the first time and left my machine in an unworkable state. I had to re-install a couple of times to make things work somewhat normally again. This isn't a pleasant user experience, but of course I'm used to such things.

Second thing to report is that even though this isn't production code yet (meaning it hasn't officially been released), the installation offered no choices for continuing to run IE6 as an alternative. The existing browser was over-written. This is a bit of a problem for web developers who need to check their code on multiple browsers. In order to be able to check both IE6 and IE7 I would need to use two machines.

Now for the good news (and bad news). It seems that they have indeed fixed a lot of CSS quirks (and presumably Javascript/ECMA quirks and DOM quirks and ...). You'd think this was good, no?

No. Because until IE7 is widely deployed, the developer trying to write cross-browser apps needs to add yet another 'if' statement into every section of their code where cross-browser issues creep in. It is no longer enough to detect 'Gecko' or 'MSIE' and providing behaviour based on these possibilities (this is making a lot of simplifying assumptions about Opera, and IE/Mac, and the real old browsers). Now you've got to add yet another behaviour for the differences between MSIE7 and any other versions of MSIE which you've already got hacks for. 

You're thinking that this shouldn't be much of a change, and you're probably right - at least for one particular page. But consider that there are millions, if not hundreds of millions of pages out there written with browser specific hacks in place. Somebody spent a lot of time to make sure that they looked the same on IE and Firefox (and Opera and Lynx and Netscape, etc.), and now they're going to have to spend a lot of time fixing them all once again because they will all be broken.

The good news is that once IE7 does get widely deployed, you might eventually be able to write a web page that looks the same on Firefox and IE without a lot of special case code. The bad news is that it may take several years for IE7 to get widely deployed.