Ready for ie7 ?

I’m not – but that’s besides the point. IE7 is coming to many computers near you, whether you like it, or not. The soon-to-be-released update to everyone’s favorite browser will soon be packaged into automatic Windows updates (by the way – do yourself a favor and turn those off, eh?) – and Windows users all over the net will be subject to an upgrade.

Sigh.

And people wonder why I stockpile food in my cellar? So when IE7 is released, I can lock myself inside to avoid the mob on my front lawn of past clients dating back lord knows how many years, looking for their site to be fixed in IE7. Note to self: must put statement in my TOS so folks understand that IE7 wasn’t released at the time their sites were built and I won’t be held responsible when stuff breaks. You can, however, hire me to implement the fixes for you if you experience issues with your site when IE7 updates on your computer (second reminder – turn those auto-updates off. Do. Them. Manually.)

So, in the spirit of imparting knowledge on my co-bloggers, developers, designers and the like – here’s some great bookmarking material:

• The IE 7 Readiness Toolkit pulls together documentation, tools, and guidance for developers, testers, and ITPros to prepare sites, extensions and applications for IE 7.
• The Cascading Style Sheet Compatibility in Internet Explorer 7 – documentation on common breaking patterns and techniques you can do to avoid them.
• Developer and ITPro Checklists
• An Application Compatibility Toolkit that logs and identifies changes in behavior due to changes in IE 7 and Vista.
• All of this is wrapped up for you in the Information Index for IE 7
• Web Developer Toolbar to aid in the development and debugging of a website viewed in IE7

Just can’t help yourself? You need more and more information on it? Check out this post by Markus on the IEBlog called Details on our CSS changes for IE7 – you’ll keep yourself busy for hours and hours of enjoyment reading about how IE has fixed several (hundreds, thousands) of CSS bugs.

All this lead in.. all this hype .. all of these headaches when a person could just do themselves a favor and browse happy. (or download my personal fav – Firefox

Questions? Don’t ask me yet – – I’m no expert on IE7 by any means. I have not downloaded the beta version and have a strict personal policy to never, ever, ever download ANYTHING from Microsoft that is still a beta release. Heck, I don’t download it even when they release a stable version – – until maybe the third go round when they’ve released a service pack that fixes all the bugs in their ‘stable release’