IE7 is now done and out. It is of course tempting to be glib and say “too little, too late”. While undeniably true, this upgrade matters. In part because there is an upgrade, giving hope of more to come, but also because many of the issues that are actually fixed have held back web design.

The poster example is transparency in PNG, the obvious selling point of that graphics format relative to GIF. While IE6 must be classified with “as little as we can get away with” (even then I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t fix this minor but important shortcoming), IE7 is “making the most of what we have got”. Yes, they will have to do a lot of running to catch up with the rest of the world, but at least this signals an intent to be in the running.