We’ve actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the web design community that per-pixel alpha is a really important feature.
I commend Microsoft for listening to their customers, and hope they will continue to do so when they hear calls for full CSS 2.1 support. :-)
Heh. This is a good forcing-upgrade strategy.
1. Many many novice web devs that get IE7 will use PNGs.
2. Badly rendered PNGs will annoy all the people still on IE6 or below.
3. Said annoyed people will have a recurring, visible, itching reminder to upgrade.
Will people buy new Windows versions just to make the web look more orderly? I think so.
IE7 is not available to win2k and below. To avoid those “badly rendered PNGs”, they have no choice but to switch their browser, which is a great news to us. ;-)
If only they had done it sooner.
I agree with Minghong. All those Win2000 users are perfect Firefox users. Is there any organized effort to get Firefox into Win2000 shops?
There’s still the problem of Win2000 and WinNT being used in corporate environments, and may thus rely on home-made ActiveX controls on their intranet.
I don’t know how reliable the purported Mozilla ActiveX plug-in is, but I guess these people are still going to stand off. Besides, I hardly think the IT people in those places see any use in PNG per-pixel transparency, when they’ve used GIFs for most of their time online ;-).
Still, getting out to the SoHo user will be more than enough, and will help our community marketing efforts. Well, unless Microsoft convinces them to grab Longhorn, that is…
There is a patch available to change the badly rendered parts.