The much awaited Internet Explorer 7 browser has now been out for a while and my stats show that up to 30% of IE browser users have upgraded to version 7. The gap between Firefox and IE will probably be bridged and it seems the new IE will do a much better job than its predecessors. I had, however, been quite mad at IE7 since its release because it was making some of my IE6 CSS hacks fail; I couldn’t install IE7 on my laptop to work on those issues – not wanting to loose IE6 as my main testing platform – and had to bite my tongue. Well, my nails.

Then today I found this very clever way to run IE7 as a standalone browser WITHOUT loosing IE6. The trick isn’t perfect and some features don’t work, but for compatibility testing purposes, it’s a miracle. So I got back to my failing CSS hacks; the main problem seemed to be with the famous !important trick. Researching the issue, I came across an article mentioning that if IE7 now recognizes !important correctly, all IE version still ignore !anything. I had my new hack; I replaced all my !important by !ie7hack and we’re back to normal. Cheap trick, but eh!

So for those of you using IE7, the blog’s main menu is now back. Alleluya!