For the past several months I don’t think I ever had a positive thing to say in the same sentence as “Internet Explorer”. Well, that has changed now. I’ve been delaying pulling down the IE 7 betas for fear of how difficult my life would become in trying to adapt my JavaScript solutions to the new browser.

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. I mean not surprised enough to switch, but surprised enough to chear for the launch of IE7 as a high priority update so that I can actually dream of the day when IE 6 is no more. I don’t have any solid numbers for exactly WHAT is faster, but the whole thing is a LOT snappier. Total operations that I had timed on IE6 to take 7-10 seconds are now taking 300-400ms, which is on par with Firefox and Opera. These operations consist of very heavy DOM manipulation and a good deal of JavaScript parsing.

Maybe its time to take some of those “IE SUCKS” comments out of the body of my if statements that have to do something different for IE6 or subject the user to interminable delays.

So, I am pleasantly surprised, and I haven’t been pleasant or surprised about anything out of Redmond for quite some time!

Somewhat ironically, I did notice that none of the CSS glitches that plagued the site I was testing on IE seem to have been corrected by the upgrade. And this after months of hearing that CSS fixes were the priority and that about all we could expect for JavaScript enhancements was the elimination of the dreaded closure memory leaks. Oh well… CSS I can fix. JavaScript that runs 10-20 times slower on IE than anything else is another matter.