I’ve been wondering whether to serve the Internet Explorer hack file to IE7 or not. I had vain hopes that the long-awaited update might fix most of the infuriating bugs.

Mezzoblue’s damning review of Internet Explorer version 7 indicates that hacks are going to be needed for quite some time to come.

To summarise the improvements:

  • It’s got tabs.
  • PNG transparency has been added.
  • The Peekaboo bug is fixed.
  • The Guillotine bug is fixed, but bodged: it still behaves incorrectly, but less badly.

And that, apparently, is it:

Other than that? After running through Position Is Everything’s “Explorer Exposed” omnibus, it seems to me that the list of outstanding IE bugs remains long. Line-height bug? Not fixed. Border chaos? Chaotic as ever. Italic overflows? Still buggy. Doubled float margin? Nope. 3px jog? Nuh-uh. Escaping floats? No way.

It makes you wonder what they have been doing since releasing version 6 in 2000. That is not four years’ worth of bug fixes and improvements, especially not for a company with that much money and people to throw at the problem. It’s a damning indictment of the world’s largest software company when they are so comprehensively trounced by amateurs.

Prepare to be equally disappointed by Windows Longhorn Vista, which, on this evidence, is going to be the same old rubbish, but shinier.