IE7 Upgrade Woes

Well although I generally use Firefox I had to upgrade to IE7 today as a customer has spotted a problem with our website (www.ippatrol.com) whereby a redirect was looping.

It turns out IE7 is a little more picky about the REFRESH meta tag.

In all previous versions of IE and Firefox the following worked.

<meta equiv="REFRESH" content="1; anotherpage.html">

Under IE7 this just causes the page to constantly refresh. Adding the URL option fixes the issue.

<meta equiv="REFRESH" content="1; URL=anotherpage.html">

I've also seen comments on various blogs that this tag doesn't work or is disabled in IE7 and that somewhere in IE7 is an option to turn support on and off. I haven't seen this issue but then I only redirect internally within the site so perhaps it only takes affect when you redirect off site.

Just in case I've added some javascript code to do the redirect as well. Hopefully one or other method will fire otherwise the visitor can click on the link displayed to get to the contact page.

The second issue I had with IE7 was that PDF's no longer worked and just came up with a page error saying object required.

I quickly guessed this might be because my Acrobat Reader was also well out of date (V6.0.2 from 2004) even though it works fine in Firefox and worked in IE6.

So I bit the bullet and upgraded to Acrobat Reader V7.0 and now both Firefox and IE7 work with PDFs.

I have to say I am quite impressed with the speed of IE7 and the speed of the new version of Acrobat Reader. There are a few enhancements in IE7 most of which are just catching up with Firefox plus a few others which are useful if annoying such as the certificate checker/warnings and the fact that such errors are displayed on the address bar if you decide to ignore them - a nice reminder.

I did however notice that the IE7 pop up blocker is turned off by default which I find a little odd. The phishing facility warns you that its not turned on the first time you start IE7 but for some reason the pop up blocker doesn't - not very consistent or helpful.