October 22, 2006 - Things To Look For When Testing Your Site with IE7

Soon, many of us will need to test our web applications and web sites for Internet Explorer 7 compatibility.

As I have time, I'll list some of the problematic and potentially problematic issues that I encounter here.  If you find others, send me an email!

Address Bar in all windows

In IE7, an Address Bar will be included in all windows.  This is intended as a security feature - a way to help users avoid clicking on problematic popups and links within them.

But many sites use simple popup windows with specific dimensions as dialog boxes.  Often, they haven't allocated space for the Address Bar.  Thus, with IE7, many of these popups will now have scrollbars where before they did not.

Status Bar scripting

In IE7, scripts can no longer change the Status Bar text when the user chooses the default security settings.  If your web app writes text to the Status Bar, you will either need to instruct your uses to customize their security settings (by setting "Allow status bar updates via script" to Enable) or change your web app to write this text somewhere else.

Script Access to the Clipboard

In IE7, if a script attempts to access the clipboard, the user will be prompted for permission.  Accessing the clipboard is probably not something you would usually want in your web app.  (see: http://www.sqablogs.com/jstrazzere/545/Web+Pages+Can+See+Your+Clipboard.html)

ClearType Text

By default, IE7 renders text using ClearType.  For the most part, this is probably good.  But, you'll still want to check it and see how it looks with your web app - using both LCD and CRT monitors.

(see also: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/03/524367.aspx) 

Some Tools Don't (Yet) Support IE7

Not specifically a problem with your web site, but some support tools you may use might not yet be IE7-ready themselves.

I use WinTask a lot, for example.  The current version of WinTask (Version 3.2) does not work with IE7.  The folks at Taskware tell me they are working on the next version, and will have it out soon.

It won't stop us from supporting IE7, but it might make things harder. 

AJAX issues

It turns out that IE7 has a new feature “Native XMLHttp Support”.  The new feature is enabled by default.  This may or may not cause problems with web applications built using AJAX.

see: http://www.techtoolblog.com/archives/ie-7-native-xmlhttprequest-not-so-good

Adobe Reader 6 doesn't work well with IE7

In order to display PDFs in IE7, I had to upgrade the version of Adobe Reader I was using from version 6 to  version 7.