I was in the Sony store at the Metreon the other day because Vista has been driving me nuts, I can't find my restore disks, and in a moment of weakness I was contemplating a new laptop. Anyway they had some pretty nice models, but what struck me most when playing around with the different computers was that IE7 was installed as the default browser on each of these computers. Consider IE7 wrecks havoc on sites like WordPress.org, I better start testing with it.
My understanding is that, in a few months, its going to part of a planned automatic update, so you’re probably right in thinking that its time to test with it (oh well, maybe it will get better).
Microsoft needs to get completely out of the browser business and leave it to the professionals…like Mozilla, the Flock team, etc. IE 5, 6, and 7 are all tools of the devil.
BETA software as default? How Web 2.0 of them.
I’m curious, Matt, what makes you want to go for a Sony, over say, a Macbook?
I’m no mac zealot, I’m just having to make a similar decision myself at the moment and would love to hear your thoughts!
Why Sony? Thinkpad or Apple are the way to go.
For me, Sonys have had the best combination of form factor, battery life, and features. I own a powerbook and a mac mini, they just don’t get as much use. To me the operating system isn’t as important (as long as it works) because I spend my whole day in editors and web apps anyway.
IE7 will be deployed as an update via Microsoft Update, thus a large number of machines will have it once it goes gold (which, irrc, is not far away). It’s been around for a while, I’m surprised you haven’t been on top of that Matt, how un-geek of you. 🙂
Personally I don’t care very much what happens with IE7. There’s only so much time you can spend banging your head against a brick wall to support legacy systems. 🙁
I do try and make my own WP site work reasonably well with IE but I’d much rather just point IE users to a working browser like Firefox instead.
I thought WP was so rational from a markup standpoint that any modern browser could render it, even Safari with its oddball JavaScript. Nu?
I’ve got the latest IE7 and it still doesn’t render things quite right. It also does a weird anti-aliasing thing that totally ruins scriptaculous js effects.
That would be it’s fabled sub-pixel rendering…
First generation MacBooks are having a few problems, which is not unheard of in the Apple universe. There are enough frustrated repair/replacments going on which warrant waiting for Apple to get it right in the second generation release, again a common theme known to the Mac faithful.
As for Sony, I haven’t a clue. For any Windows or Linux notebook, you’d be far better off having a custom made solution to fit your needs — that’s the point of all the choices!
I just picked up a new Sony ZD260. Great little beast. However, it didn’t have IE7 preinstalled. No new Sony’s do. It might have just been an in-store decision 🙂
MS have stated that the release version will have no new CSS features or fixes, so it is safe to test with the (reassuringly non-standards-compliant) beta that is out now.
Laptop-wise, I find the wobble test is the most effective selector of laptop. Find a few that appear to have the spec you need, then poke the top corner of the screen. If it wobbles about, forget it. If it stays put and looks at your feeble finger as if to say “don’t push me, fool” then you know it’s well constructed.
This simple test makes shop owners furrow their brow in confusion, for often they do not comprehend that laptops are used in cars, in trains, on planes and even on laps, where there is movement. IMO The hands down winner for the wobbly screen test has (for the last 10 years) been the IBM ThinkPad (I’ve owned HP, Dell (x2), Compaq and IBM (x2)).
It remains to be seen if the transfer of the business to Lenovo will result in a lower quality solution, because the older models are head and shoulders above the plastic tat that many vendors ship.
I’ve installed and uninstalled IE7 a couple of times, for a ‘standards compliant’ browser it certainly has had more than it’s share of issues rendering things correctly. At this writing it seems they’ve worked out most of the major ‘quirks’. It this point I’d say the responsibility lies squarely with developers to deliver clean standards compliant code (to both firefox and IE) including any javascript implemented, and the browsers should be able to handle the rest.
I have an Intel MacBook 15″, black. It is very very very nice. Hardware-wise. (And OSX is allright, I s’pose). I routinely get 4 hours battery life, and frankly, in on-and-off usage I can leave the thing unplugged almost all day. It is very small, sleek, kinda on the light side (well, middleweight), and attractive, and has a really cool magnetic power plug.
Maybe I haven’t owned enough laptops but I can’t imagine a better notebook. And OSX is good enough that I don’t even have to install Linux 🙂
In any case, just my $0.02US on the MacBook.
Now, as a web developer, I am dreading the day when MS pushes IE7 onto everything. Dread…. Woe…. It’s coming soon, too. So much for those IE
There have been quite a number of problems with IE 7, since it is still under beta development. Normally, I keep a copy of Firefox along with me as well, just in case IE 7 fails to render page correctly, just like this one.
No doubt IE has been the most used browser in the world, but lately, the improvement has been really poor. Firefox, on the other hand has been catching up. Though I never really fancy Opera, but Opera 9 has been known to perform far much better than IE or Firefox.
He said the demo models had IE7. Suddenly, in someone’s infinite wisdom, this morphed into Sony installing IE7 by default on new machines.
why don’t people read?
I use Opera 9 (beta version, because I can’t get the new 9 to override the beta, LOL), and adore it. BUT! The only way to get anything to look right in all browsers is to have it xHTML valid. The major problem with a lot of the WP sites that look like crap in IE or any other browser is the simple fact that they haven’t checked for xHTML validity. If they do that, unless they’ve got an extremely long word or large graphic, the site will look nearly identical in all browsers.
Seeing as IE is still by far the most used browser, if you want to alienate the majority of users, go ahead. I would rather get it to work with them all.
Mozilla would be fine if they would fix the same problem IE used to be… a resource hog that doesn’t release memory.
I’ve got a gorgeous little pink sony fj series. Yummy. Installed IE7.0 beta-2 a couple of weeks ago, no noticable problems with wordpress usage, though I got a bit confused when I updated to wordpress 2.04 using it (turned out not to be an IE issue). But you really should be testing with it for the automatic update deployment from microsoft which will happen soon.
I just tested wordpress.org on Browsercam, after having tested my site when you worried me with this lol. Looks fine? Where’s the havoc wreakage?
On the download page when you hover over a link all the content disappears.