It's He-ere – Internet Explorer 7 – Final Release Version

I will reserve final judgement until I can properly view all my sites (I'm on a Mac and BrowserCam does not yet have the final version available), but for those waiting in anticipation, Internet Explorer 7 has arrived. An 8 pound-10 ounce bouncing bundle of joy — or so we hope. Call me naive, but for the most part, I'm actually looking forward to it. Many of the rendering bugs in IE6 are reported fixed. Most of my sites have held together pretty well through the beta versions I could test on. I don't code using a lot of hacks for older versions of Internet Explorer, and many of the bugs I was squashing with the "* html #selectorName" trick have been fixed. So even though IE7 won't see those separate IE-specific values, it shouldn't need them too often either.

I have been looking at Internet Explorer 7 a great deal over the past two days. Partly because I'm preparing to present two of the more advanced CSS sessions at Adobe MAX and wanted to be sure I had the latest available info to share, and partly because some of our subscribers have started to ask questions about IE7 in our Community MX forums. In light of that, today I ran all our JumpStarts through the IE7 beta3 over at BrowserCam — and though there are some reported changes between the beta and the final release version — they fared pretty well. I'll check them again as soon as the final version is available to compare. It appears we'll need to make a couple tweaks to Internet Explorer Conditional Comments (IECC) here and there, but overall it looks swell.

I'll report more as we test the JumpStarts and as I test my own sites. Let me know how you fare too…