This week not one, but two big browsers made major upgrades. I’ve gotten a change to play with both and I think everyone is on the right track, some just a wee bit behind.

IE7 has been a long time coming. I think they said IE6 was released 5 years ago or so? Anyways, the new IE seems to be better. I’ve been running it on my Mac (via Parallels) and it seems to be on the right track. It’s got transparent PNG support (finally), RSS support, tabs and I think it seems to work with the CSS :hover property too! All steps in the right direction but it seems like it could make things worse before it makes them better.

Blog on a stick is now 14.7% friendlier to our IE visitors. I removed a script that allowed IE to actually render transparent PNG’s with transparent backgrounds. It seemed to be slowing down the blog for those users and I didn’t like that. So it’s gone. Instead, you get to see an ugly background on all transparent PNG files. It’s not my fault, blame Bill Gates.

Of course, if you are using Firefox, Opera, Flock, SeaMonkey, Safari or basically any non-IE browser, you have no idea what I’m talking about because your browser rocks.

I’ve recently started checking out Opera 9 Beta I’m not sure why I stumbled across it but I have to say, it’s quite a nice browser.

Now I’m a Firefox guy and there are to many good features to pass up, but Opera is pretty slick too. They’ve added support for WYSIWYG editors like those in Wordpress blogs. They’ve also got a built in RSS reader, spell check, ad blocker, themes and widgets.

AllTheWeb, a Yahoo search engine, is now testing live search. Take a little of Google Suggest, some Ajax and of course good search results, mix them together and get LiveSearch. It gives you suggestions and results as you type. Pretty cool and fun to play with.

On the down side, no Safari or Opera support yet.