Dropping IE6 Support; What Do We Gain? ... HTML / CSS / JavaScript Functionality & Techniques

Question

The web development community is at the tipping point of ditching Internet Explorer 6 support - even Microsoft is counting down it's demise http://ie6countdown.com/!

This raises a very interesting question... What do we gain?

We've been weighed down by the ball and chain that is IE6 for so long it's really interesting to consider all the good stuff we've neglected...

With IE7 as the new baseline for backwards compatibility, how will this impact web development? What HTML, CSS or JavaScript functionality / techniques can we now expect from our browsers?

For example, I'm really looking forward to being able to use CSS Chained Classes.

.class1.class2.class3 {
  background: #fff;
}

<div class="class1 class2 class3">
  <p>Content here.</p>
</div>

P.S This question was inspired by CSS Differences in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 from Smashing Magazine.

Answer 1

From a web developer standpoint, there is surprisingly little in the way of extra functionality. Many standard APIs present in other browsers are still missing. The gain comes more in the shape of a lot of small improvements in IE7 compared to IE6.

• Improved but imperfect PNG transparency support
• Native XMLHttpRequest (not useful: ActiveX is still required for file: URLs)
• Some CSS layout fixes
• Much better CSS support, as laid out in the article linked in the question

Some things that haven't improved between IE 6 and 7:

• The JScript engine is still very slow relative to modern browsers, the JSCript API is missing many methods introduced by Mozilla that were copied in other browsers and later standardized, and JScript retains many quirks and bugs
• Many CSS layout issues are still present
• Some new CSS bugs were introduced