A big geeky post for today.
The big geek news from the past few days is that Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7. After a stagnant past five years in which Microsoft has barely touched Internet Explorer, they have finally produced a new version. Most analysts say that it is a result from Firefox eating away at their market share that has prompted them to actually do something to update their browser.
You can download IE7 from the Microsoft website.
I made very public my dislike for IE6 when i switched to Firefox a few years back, so what do I think of IE7?
I think it's a sound improvement that they really needed to make, and I encourage anyone who uses Internet Explorer to make the upgrade. Tabbed browsing is now included, as well as a bit off RSS and anti-phishing support, bundled together with a new look. Is it enough to make me go back? Not even close. The whole text resizing thing mentioned in my conversion has still not changed (i think the new 'zoom' function is also useless though), and the functionality that Firefox provides is still unmatched.
This new version would be giving web developers a big headache. IE7 renders pages differently than it's predecessor (in a good way: much more CSS support), but it means that developers will have to design pages for two different versions of IE, as some people will be slow to upgrade. To combat this, Microsoft will be pushing IE7 out in next month's automatic Windows Update, so many won't even have to choose to upgrade, Windows will do it for them.
As an aside, if you notice any funny things with my website using IE7, it would be much appreciated if you would let me know.
In other browser news, in the past few days I have been trying out the release candidate of the next version of Firefox (2.0), which should be released properly in the next week or so. As with IE7, the new stuff is a logical improvement, but with this new version of Firefox nothing totally major has seemed to have changed. One of the big new things is inline spell checking within forms, which is good, although I do prefer using the Spellbound extension that seems to have ceased being updated.
Anywho, last night in one of my "i'm going to do 'x' until it's done moment", I went through the whole code for this blog with the purpose of making the xhtml pages validate against the W3C standards. This includes making sure the structure is correct as well as a few other things. At about 1am i finished, so you should be able to see this blog pass the validator by checking it here. Very satisfied with myself at that. I plan to do a few more behind the scenes stuff with the blog to clean up the database as well.
Edit: I just noticed that this happens to be by 400th blog entry! woot! *streamers and balloons*
Edit2: Just made some behind the scenes changes, if anything is screwy/not working, please let me know.