This Website Supports IE 7++
I’ve been trying very hard not to get worked up by the various details that have come out of the Internet Explorer 7 development team over the last year or so; maybe I just didn’t bother raising my expectations once I heard that CSS 2 and CSS 3 implementation wasn’t as high on their list of priorities as was, say, tabs.
Today’s post at the IE blog, however, sent me over the edge.
There will be two versions of IE 7 — something in itself that isn’t too surprising, since there were multiple flavors of IE 5.x (Mac, Win9x, WinXP/2000). Unfortunately, some market-mindful monkey has decided that they will be called different things: IE7 for Win2000/XP/2003 and IE7+ for Vista.
What’s the difference between the two, other than the operating systems? Obviously if it’s IE7+ then it has to be better, right? Wrong. Apparently features as “Protected Mode, Parental Controls and improved Network Diagnostics” qualify as the “plus”. You know, critical things that most folks like you and I will likely never use.
The big problem with this inane naming convention — and the crux of my problem with it — is that it merely sows confusion. Ever run into anybody who was baffled by the differences between Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional or Visual Studio Standard and Visual Studio Professional? How about the dozen or so different flavors of Office?
Even more frustrating is the monkey wrench this throws into the usual convention web developers use to describe browser support. For instance, if my website works under Firefox versions 1.5 and later, I merely say that Firefox 1.5+ is supported. Same with IE5.5.
Now what? “This website supports Internet Explorer 7++”?
The IE7 dev team claims:
These [aforementioned] features take advantage of big changes in Windows Vista and weren’t practical to bring downlevel. The IE7+ naming gives us an easy way to refer to this version. (“The version of IE7 in Vista” doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily…)
Right. So instead of you guys dealing with a perceived naming issue internally, you’re going to force the rest of us on the planet to adopt a name that will help tout the superiority of your next OS product. Thanks.
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May 26th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
Why so POd? This was announced months ago. That was the time to complain, not now.l
May 27th, 2006 at 5:07 am
Wow. No need to get so worked up over the “+” character. It’s not a great decision, no, but it’s hardly Apocalypse Now.
May 27th, 2006 at 5:19 am
But as you said, IE7 is under IE7+ so you can just say IE7+. Looks like you were running out of ways to complain.
Force us to adopt a name?
What, suddenly everybody will stop just saying IE and start saying Windows Internet Explorer 7.0.5346.1 PLUS?
May 27th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
I reckon Darren is from Microsoft. ha
I havn’t used IE for about 2 years and never plan on using it ever again so i dont really care, its just so funny their browser is so crap!
How can tabs be higher on their list of priorities, you would have thought it would have been better to strive to be better than everyone else and go for complete CSS compliance :/ damn it i hate tables, divs all the way!
May 28th, 2006 at 8:49 am
okay a: I don’t work for MS, how did you get that idea..?
b: What has tabs got to do with.. this post at all?
c: They are, in IE7 (in my opinion) already better than everybody else. Personally I think IE7 is superior to firefox in /almost/ every way - the plugin support is poor.
(ironically this post was made from firefox just cause it happened to open in it when i clicked a link in msn messenger :>)
June 6th, 2006 at 12:40 am
The + is daft, I suggest that we just called it IE7v
June 14th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
The ‘+’ is merely to differentiate between IE7 for XP, and IE for Vista… it’s a good idea to seperate the two somehow because if left alone, they’re bound to release patches and updates for IE7, and people complain that they won’t install on their machines. Having the + will let people know whether the update is for IE in XP or IE in Vista. Granted, + may mean many things to many people… but it’s better than nothing and hardly the end of the world.
October 5th, 2006 at 8:38 pm
[...] I was happy to see, however, that sanity prevailed at Microsoft regarding IE7’s name. I had bitched about their previous plan of calling one version IE7 and one IE7+, and I guess I wasn’t alone. While it was — and still is – a petty issue, we sure as hell don’t need any more confusion when it comes to the Web. [...]