Time has really gotten away from me these past few weeks, months. Business has been growing and the fun stuff like this blog have slipped further and further down the list of priorities. I have a few moments to sit down tonight and talk about some of the things I have been meaning to post about.

First on the list is the release of Internet Explorer 7.0 (IE7). This is important for many reasons. As you may have gathered from my previous post, I am not a fan of IE, but since most people still use IE, it is essential that your site functions properly in this browser. One of my biggest complaints about the browser is that it still is not fully compliant with w3 web standards, and makes proper use of css (cascading stylesheets) difficult and frustrating.

All that aside, let's talk about what will be happening to many websites out there in the very near future. Many websites will suddenly look different. Images and text may display differently, credit card transactions may not function properly. Word is, IE7 will be bundled as a Windows XP update, so large masses of users will suddenly be upgraded to the new version of IE. To see if your site will be affected, download IE7 and check for yourself. If you encounter problems, have your web developer begin working on the fixes NOW before visitors to your site have an opportunity to upgrade.
Some of the changes are very positive, including some of the changes that may be "breaking" your site. IE7 has better security features, tabbed browsing (one of my favorite features of Firefox), RSS feed integration and more advanced searching.

Features that may impact your website are:

Updated CSS behavior:
While this is, for the most part, a good thing, it may effect the way your site displays. Even if your site is standards compliant or displays properly in IE6 or Firefox, it may look different in IE7. Your web programmer should be able to resolve any display issues.

Added Security features:
IE7 has disabled ActiveX controls by default. ActiveX controls are specialized functionalities for things like pop up menus, animations, applications and many other web tools. Users must manually download and/or activate the controls. This could discourage visitors from staying on your website.
IE7 also has stronger SSL defaults which can affect how your shopping cart or credit card processing works.

AJAX XMLHTTP:
The IE Blog says: "to have your cross-browser AJAX work better with IE7, you really should be invoking the native XMLHttpRequest (the cross-browser one) first to see if it’s available before instantiating the ActiveX control, instead of the other way around."
Read this guys comments http://www.techtoolblog.com/archives/ie-7-native-xmlhttprequest-not-so-good

RSS Integration:
IE7 automatically detects RSS feeds. Make sure yours are compatible.

If you need help making your website compatible with IE7, give us a call. We can help update your site and check for compatibility in all the commonly used web browsers.