Even the most sceptical frontend developers will have cracked a small grin when they frist dropped their web pages into IE7 and discovered less breakage than in previous versions of IE. It seems Microsoft have finally ironed out many of their most defeating and irksome bugs and this will one day mean simpler, quicker and more cost effective CSS development. Fantastic. Thank you very much Microsoft, blah, blah, blah.

But even with these bug fixes, IE7 is still lagging behind it’s competitors, namely Firefox, Opera, and Safari, and there’s an growing call for more to be done.

Mark Nyman asks “IE7 - is catching up good enough?“, while Roger Johansson says that “IE7 is better but still lagging” and “is not ready for release”. More worryingly, there’s also a growing list of new bugs which, quite honestly, are starting to make me wonder if IE6 is not the more appealing browser of the two. Vanishing content!? Incorrect rendering!? Problems with background images disappearing or not resizing on zoom? Not good. (see IE7: Old Bugs For New for more on that).

Obviously new bugs will crop up with a new release, but Chris Wilson, the group program manager of the Internet Explorer Platform at Microsoft, and his team seem to have created a new catalogue of issues more severe than the bugs they set out to fix in the first place.

I think part of the problem comes from trying to rework a rendering engine that should have been laid to rest 5 years ago. IE7, as much as I want to love it, really does feel like a rust bucket with a new lick of paint. Shame. No thank you Microsoft, blah, blah, blah.

The good news is that Chris mentioned in his presentation at @media2006 that his return to the IE project was on the understanding that there would be more than just a one-off improvement to IE7. IE7 should be the first in a line of regular updates and enhancements designed to bring Internet Explorer (back) up to speed. Firefox has done well with this philosophy; it has a continuously evolving, modern rendering engine that is capable of meeting today’s needs. So lets hope that Microsoft follow suit with plans to introduce a new rendering engine as a priority, and that IE will oneday be the browser that we all desperately want it to be.