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I was shown this thread by my dad who is a member here.  I hope you'll allow me to shed some light... I am a web designer.  I do not use Internet Explorer unless I absolutely have to (I use Firefox if you're curious).  IE has for a long time been a source of problems because Microsoft chooses to let the computer illiterate (that's an observation, not judgement) dictate what one can do with a browser. See, over the last five years or so, IE became sort of a mini "operating system" in and of itself.  Not content with just viewing webpages, Mom wants to play Mahjonng, Dad wants to see realtime stock movements, and junior and sis want to play videos and surf MySpace and play action games right in the browser. In order to do that, IE has to let websites install software on your browser.  You've seen these things - they're usually called ActiveX controls.  Thing is, most computer-illiterate users will click "yes" to practically anything that is shown to them, and this is why we have spyware, malware, adware, and whatever you want to call it. I remember when there were computer viruses - notice how you don't really see them anymore in their usual form?  That should tell you how much easier Microsoft has made virus authors' lives.  They don't need to write viruses; they just need to exploit the "open" nature of IE. What does this have to do with IE7?  Well, in a nutshell, Microsoft got a big surprise a couple years back when Firefox started taking their almost-monopolistic market share.  While Firefox hasn't broken 20% of web users, that's a lot to a company that was expecting near-100%.  As usual, nothing ever changes until someone's bottom line is affected, so Microsoft responded with IE7.  Overall, it looks like it's going to be a decent browser, because they've put in a lot of safeguards to prevent spyware et al from being so easily installed and IE being so easily compromised.  If you're not going to run Firefox, Opera, or one of the other alternate browsers, you should definitely install IE7. As to the problems with IE7 you're experiencing - believe it or not you've got it backwards.  IE7 actually displays HTML (web code) correctly; the problem is that IE6 and below didn't - so a lot of web designers who use IE designed "broken" sites because they were checking their work in IE.  The people in charge of what HTML is have published a "standard" as to how HTML works, and Microsoft for a large part ignored that.  They got it half-right, but you should see what kind of a pain it is to make a website that works in all different browsers because of the incorrect way IE has handled webpages.  Granted this is Microsoft's fault from the get-go, and somebody oughta hang for it, but let's face it, it's Microsoft, they're going to do what they're going to do.  In that sort of situation, I figure, better late than never. So, the problem is not with IE7.  If you're having problems on this forum, it's because the person/people who designed it were using IE6 to check their work.  They have made an IE6-only site (something that, in all fairness, you used to be able to get away with), and they need to go back and correct the programming mistakes because IE7 is here, it's not going away, and to the delight of web designers like me, it renders HTML correctly. If you can't understand where I'm coming from, imagine (and forgive my analogy, I'm not a train guy) if 80% of your trains ran one way and 20% ran the opposite way and whenever you had to make a layout, you had to make sure that all of the trains could use all of the track all of the time, without collisions or traffic problems.  IE was that 80% of your trains that was going the wrong way, however it's human nature to side with the majority even if they're wrong.   IE7 goes the right way, but you've gotta tell the guy who's running the layout. As for the HP software, it's broken because HP (stupidly) chose to write their software so that it uses Internet Explorer to display its screens.  Since they were sure everyone who would run it would be running it on IE, they were able to make extra-sloppy code, and frankly I'm not surprised it doesn't work under IE7.  HP may at some point realize this and correct their mistake, but I warn you: Microsoft has finally done something right.  However, like lowering the drinking age, there's no way to do something like this without causing some headaches in the short term.  While I'm still going to use Firefox, I think IE7 is the best thing to happen to the web in years and it's going to make my life so much easier.  I ask you to think about this before blaming the wrong things. Thanks - Mark Scudder http://www.markscudder.com
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