As my title specifies, IE7 isn't going to pass the Acid2 Test that a few browsers have now been tweaked to pass correctly. This isn't all bad though, since a member of the IE team has posted on the IE Blog a list of features (sorry, bugs) that have been fixed, which have been the bane of web designers everywhere; most of the bugs are listed on PositionIsEverything and Quirksmode:

• Peekaboo bug
• Guillotine bug
• Duplicate Character bug
• Border Chaos
• No Scroll bug
• 3 Pixel Text Jog
• Magic Creeping Text bug
• Bottom Margin bug on Hover
• Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
• IE/Win Line-height bug
• Double Float Margin Bug
• Quirky Percentages in IE
• Duplicate indent
• Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
• 1 px border style
• Disappearing List-background
• Fix width:auto

Also support for the following has been added:

• HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
• Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback
• CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
• CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
• Alpha channel in PNG images
• Fix :hover on all elements
• Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body

My favourite of those is the PNG alpha channel support... it's been a long time coming! WAYYYYYY too long. So there are a lot of good features and fixes coming with IE7, but I've seen Beta 1 and I'm not too impressed with it. The layout of the buttons, address bar and menu bar leave a lot to be desired. To me it looks like Microsoft have completely ignored their previous UI rules, and the Windows Media Player team have got their hands on it. I really hope all the testers complain repeatedly about how hideous it is, and they fix the UI for Beta 2 (which should be publicly available, unlike Beta 1).

Read the rest of the IE Blog entry here.