Potentially more exciting than the arrival of a new phonebook is the planned automatic update of Microsoft’s web browser, Internet Explorer. If you haven’t already heard about it-and I’m sure that most of you have-Microsoft is planning to release the first major upgrade to Internet Explorer since IE6 in 2001. With many new features, security upgrades, and changes to the core software itself, it’s a totally new browser that will suddenly be the primary browser of a good 70% or more of your audience. Is your site ready for that? If you don’t know for sure, now’s the time to find out.

At some point during the next few months (the fourth quarter of this year,) Microsoft will be rolling out this upgrade as a high-priority, automatic update. That means that most Windows XP users will simply be online one day when they’ll receive a popup alert from the system tray saying that updates are ready for their computer. Virtually overnight, you’ll find most of your site visitors have made the switch.

This all seems straightforward enough until you consider someone like my father. My father is in his 70s. He browses the ‘Net daily. If presented with the option to install a security update, he has been trained to click accept (without trying to comprehend what specifically it is patching). If he accepts this and suddenly his browser experience changes (sites that used to render properly no longer work) he’ll be completely confused. He wouldn’t know how to uninstall.

– Tom Raftery IE7 + Automatic Update = support nightmare

Frankly, this is true for the majority of your users. Like it or not, once the change is made, there’ll be no going back. Certain questions then arise:

• What will they see when they go to your site?
• Should you panic?
• Will you need to recode?
• Are you ready for the new toys? (Didn’t expect that last one, did you.)

Let’s have a look at what this change will mean for your site.

Things to Be Happy About

Those of us that routinely use other browsers or check our sites out in multiple browsers will find a lot of very familiar things integrated into IE7. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I’m happy for the changes and improvements they’ve made, but on the other, I find it annoying that a majority of non-technically-oriented web users will think of these as Microsoft innovations rather than Microsoft trying to catch up with everyone else’s innovations. Still, there is a lot to be happy about in this upgrade. Some of it-like improved web standards and CSS support-might require changes for some sites (That’s a good thing, really.) and some of it-like RSS integration-are an open opportunity to provide new services and gain a larger audience.

Tabbed Browsing

That’s right, tabbed browsing has finally made its way to Internet Explorer (boldly going where everyone else has been for quite some time.) If you’re like me and you regularly have to have a number of applications running simultaneously and then additionally have to open several different browsers to compare page layouts, then you’ll truly appreciate this addition. I can finally have ONE window of Internet Explorer open with a number of web pages displayed in different tabs (as I always could in other browsers.)

My only regret here is that there’s not yet a good, all-purpose, cross-browser compatible script to automatically open external links in new tabs rather than new windows. This would make a nice addition to Paul Boag’s External Links script that I (like many others) use so extensively. However, I’m sure that one will come along eventually.

RSS Integration

This is truly an awesome feature. I know that it’s already been a standard part of other browsers, but, because 70% to 90% of your users are surfing the web with nothing but Internet Explorer, the sudden ability to read and subscribe to RSS feeds right in their browser will be a totally new experience. If your site already has an RSS feed, then now’s the time to start planning how you might promote it to a more main-stream audience as well as how you might make it a more prominent part of your pages. If your site doesn’t, then now’s the time to start working on one.

The new feed button for IE7 remains grayed out and inactive while viewing pages without a recognizable feed (RSS1, RSS2, Atom, etc.) and then springs to vivid, orange life when viewing a page that has one. I don’t know about you, but I’d like it to be one of MY sites that a user first notices this strange new button on. You know it has to be tried at least once just to see what it does, and what it does is tell your users that there’s even more content available from your site then they may have ever been aware of otherwise.

The drop-down list of available feeds and feed types next to the button is a potential source of confusion for non-technical users, but most will simply click the main button and get the topmost, default feed. Upon clicking it, however, they get not only a new feed page, but some helpful information about feeds and how to use them. My favorite part, though, is the bolded statement in the yellow box that says, “You are viewing a feed that contains frequently updated content.” That’s practically an unsolicited advertisement for viewing your feed. I really have to thank Microsoft for including that.

Between all the browsers that I’ve tried (Firefox, Opera, and IE7) and all the feed readers I’ve tried out (including Outlook 2007 RSS) nothing beats the simplicity and ease of reading feeds of IE7.

– Greg Kniffin RSS Feed Readin’ – IE7 is king

They’ve even gone a step further and added a sidebar allowing users to sort or filter your feed by date, title, author, and even category. Those categories, by the way, are the ones you’ve assigned to each piece of feed content. A little careful forethought in this department could net you some permanent, new site users viewing your content and, more especially, your advertising-especially if you pad every RSS “post” with some kind of incentive to click back through to your main pages.

Extensibility

One of the problems that Internet Explorer has always had was its inherent lack of extensibility. It was a proprietary, Microsoft application meant to do only what Microsoft had in mind when they shipped it-nothing more. This misguided approach froze it into being a passive browser. Firefox, with its numerous extensions, changed all that along with everyone’s concept of what a browser could be and what it can do.

With IE7, Microsoft has seen the light of following this approach, and they’re not stepping in with nothing either. They’re starting right out with some heavy-hitters, two of which immediately caught my eye, the Developer Toolbar-the Internet Explorer answer to Chris Pederick’s indispensable Web Developer add-in for Firefox-and Fiddler which is an HTTP Debugger that lets you fiddle around in that particular pot of code.

Of course, it remains to be seen if they can harness the kind of voluntary developer community that Firefox has, but they are off to a good start. At least this kind of “raising the bar” back and forth between the various browsers will continue to benefit all of us out here in the trenches.

Security Features

After taking it on the chin for ages, Microsoft has gotten downright serious with security-perhaps a little overboard in some ways-but serious nonetheless. One of the better aspects of this new security consciousness is their phishing filter. IE7 will block access to (or at least warn you about) fake sites that pretend to be trusted sites in order to get you to reveal private information, download malignant software, or just look around while it loads crap onto your computer in the background.

None of the phishing features in IE7 appears to cause problems with legitimate Web sites. I tested all the features in both application suites in all environments, without once running afoul of this particular feature. In fact, developers should be happy about this feature, because it means that nefarious individuals are less likely to hijack users that are coming to your Web site.

– John Mueller Making Your Apps work with Internet Explorer 7

IE7 defaults to blocking most pop-ups now. As an underhanded advertising method, this is better dropped anyway, but, as a legitimate method of delivering small pieces of extra content like product information or item pictures, this might require a little rethinking. It’s also more aggressive about cookies. A good P3P Privacy Policy should prevent most problems of this nature. There are also safeguards in place to protect against old or inappropriate SSL certificates. If yours is out of date or contains invalid information, it’s time to get that fixed now.

Better CSS Support

After working with the Web Standards Project (WaSP) since July of 2005, believe it or not, IE7 now sports CSS 2.1 compliance. That means that Internet Explorer, still the most popular browser on the planet, has made a major move-at least for Microsoft-toward the world of web standards. It’s a start.

With all these major bug fixes in place, there are those of us-myself included-who may have to revisit some of our CSS files to double-check their compatibility with IE7.

If your layout relied on us “growing” the box (if your content did not fit the dimensions you gave it) then this can lead to breaks. You can easily discover breaks related to overflow by observing content suddenly overlapping other content.

– IEBlog Cascading Style Sheet Compatibility in Internet Explorer 7

Some of the CSS hacks we’ve been using for awhile are no longer valid. I’m sure new ones will come into play. Currently, the Star-HTML hack is still okay, but others may not fair so well. It’s worth running through their posted list and checking for any hacks you may have used. Frankly, it’s just time to move away from that whole way of coding. (I’m saying that for my benefit since I’m sure that you already knew that.)

After all this, they still treat ALT text as a tooltip. Will someone please tell them that that’s a bug and not a feature. I’m so tired of it.

PNG Support

Real PNG support and everything that goes with it has finally made it to Internet Explorer.

You can now display Portable Network Graphics (PNG) images without relying on odd workarounds to implement transparency. However, some older features are also gone. If you rely on the Dynsrc attribute of the IMG tag, you’ll need to change your Web page, because it no longer works in IE7.

– John Mueller Making Your Apps work with Internet Explorer 7

I’m looking forward to seeing a lot more sites taking advantage of the real power inherent in PNG images. The combined use of lossless graphics images with layered transparencies and semi-transparencies can not only create stunningly vivid pages but, with a little imagination, whole new ways of presenting content.

Things to Worry About

Although most sites tend to look the same in IE7 as they did in IE6, there are some potential problems. Most of these have to do with site applications (like shopping carts and such) and the use of ActiveX controls. John Mueller outlined these in detail on the DevSource website, and I really encourage you to take the time to read through all five parts of his article on Making Your Apps work with Internet Explorer 7, because I’m only scratching the surface here.

Don’t wait until Microsoft releases IE7 to begin testing your applications. Based on what I’ve seen so far, unless you’re using pretty much pure HTML on static pages, your application is going to break in some way.

– John Mueller Making Your Apps work with Internet Explorer 7

ActiveX Problems

I don’t know if anyone else remembers it this way, but I seem to recall that ActiveX was developed by Microsoft as an extension of OLE back in the mid to late 90’s and pushed as an incredible new way to make the web work directly with your already existing desktop applications-especially the Microsoft ones., Now, in a bizarre turn of events, they’re trying to protect users from their own creation.

After having seen many examples of just how bad malignant ActiveX controls can get, Microsoft finally decided to add some protection for users in IE7. Unfortunately, this halfway measure doesn’t really help anyone. Users will be annoyed by having to OK every ActiveX control, every time one appears on a Web page.

– John Mueller Making Your Apps work with Internet Explorer 7

If you haven’t done it already, lose the ActiveX reliance. It’s just going to be more and more of a problem over time.

Since most other browsers (including Firefox) ignore ActiveX controls, you might want to phase out use of ActiveX in your applications. They were always a bad idea. Unfortunately, this one change is going to break many applications; everything from shopping carts to data collaboration.

– John Mueller Making Your Apps work with Internet Explorer 7

Header Information & Range Checking

If you’ve gone out of your way to provide appropriate content to your users based on the browser he or she is using or whether or not a specific plugin is available, then you’re to be commended. You went above and beyond the call of duty for the sake of your users. Unfortunately, you may now have more work to do.

A check of the request header information that IE7 provides shows that some applications will break when they employ poor range-checking methods. My test system shows that IE7 supports nine file types by default… The user agent information is also different… If your application checks for specific version numbers, rather than a range of numbers, it may stop working with IE7.

– John Mueller Making Your Apps work with Internet Explorer 7

Multiple Home Pages

This is kind of a weird thing to get used to and you may not think of it as something to worry about. The idea here is that you can have more than one home page, and they’ll all open up in separate tabs of which you can set the order.

While that’s all well and good, I can easily picture a lot of web developers running out and dusting off their old “Make this your homepage” JavaScript link. I tested this in IE7 Beta 3, and yes it does still work. If you click on one of these links, it will bring up an “Add or Change Home Page” dialog box. This will allow you make that page your only home page or add it to your home page tabs. So what’s the matter with that, you may ask. Well, frankly, familiarity breeds contempt.

I, personally, don’t want my pages associated with anything that may clog up a user’s experience online. Setting three or four homepages won’t really impact broadband users, but dialup users will see significant delays in just being able to get started when they open IE7. The usual reaction to that is to blame the last page that was added, and I don’t want that to be my page. There’s also the problem of incomplete page rendering if an impatient dialup user (Name one that isn’t.) starts browsing in another tab while your page is still loading.

All in all, I’m planning to avoid encouraging the use of my pages as home pages. It’s not really the opportunity that it might seem to be. Instead of that, I plan to create content that users will want to come back to again and again and even add to their favorites or bookmarks. I still think that the real opportunity is in the RSS integration.

Some Final Words

With all of that said about this changeover, you might be wondering about how you can check your site out. Well, to be honest, the two main methods are only available to customers running genuine Microsoft Windows. Apparently, Microsoft doesn’t want to help non-Windows-based web developers to get their sites ready for IE7. That makes no sense to me since they should want the majority of websites that their customers have been using to continue to work in their new-and-improved browser. If users make this change as planned and begin immediately seeing broken pages, then they’ll blame the browser, not the web developer.

Anyway, the two main tools are the Internet Explorer 7 Readiness Toolkit and simply downloading the latest release candidate of IE7. If you can stand the wait time and their servers aren’t too overwhelmed, then you might want to check out BrowserShots.org to get screen shots of your pages in multiple browsers including IE7.

I’m going to let John Mueller sum up what he calls “The Bottom Line” of all of this.

You might think that all of these changes are a pain. In many respects, you’re right. However, the changes really are necessary. Creating a secure internet (or at least one where you don’t have to walk on eggshells) is everyone’s responsibility. The changes you make to update your Web site to IE7 will benefit everyone. The user benefits from added security, enhanced privacy protection, and improved features. Your company benefits from fewer attacks and reduced support requirements. You’ll benefit from those extra weekends you get to spend at home, rather than at the office. Unfortunately, to get all of these benefits, you’ll need to spend time now fixing the things that caused the problems in the first place.

– John Mueller Making Your Apps work with Internet Explorer 7

Thank you all, code well, and good night.

— Timothy Dungan (aka ptvGuy) blogs and podcasts about public television station web development at http://www.ptvguy.com

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