I'm sorry you're disappointed, but we had to strike a balance between adding these optimizations, and getting support for IE8 and Safari4 out the door. The lack of such support was becoming an extremely important blocking issue for many users, and while I very much want to get to the issues you cite as soon as possible, they are optimizations (albeit important ones).
As to IE7 vs. IE8, there are two important things to consider: 1. IE7 users are upgrading to IE8 at a reasonable pace (while IE6 users are *not*, for various reasons). 2. IE7 isn't going to evolve anymore, whereas IE8 is. Other than some CSS issues, and the two issues below, IE7 is practically identical to IE6. Adding two new user agents would have had a significant impact on compile times. So it made more sense to make the split between IE6/7 and IE8. Either way, these issues should be addressed in trunk fairly soon. On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 9:29 AM, stuckagain <[email protected]> wrote: > > GWT contribs, > > I must say I am a bit disappointed with the support for IE7 in GWT > 1.7.0. > In an enterprise environment IE7 is used a lot more than IE8, but GWT > still treats it as ie6 and ie8 gets first class support. > > Take a look at these 2 issues: > http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/issues/detail?id=3589 > http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/issues/detail?id=3588 > > Both were marked for Milestone 1_6_1 but do not seem to be fixed in > this release. > > The IE6 workarounds really have a huge impact on IE7: big memory leaks > when using ImageBundles or very bad performance when you use a lot of > popup panels in an SSL environment. I hacked GWT 1.5 a bit to disable > these 2 tricks on IE7 and it makes a huge difference. > > Will these bugs be fixed in GWT 2.0 or do I have to wait until IE8 or > something else becomes mainstream in enterprise environments (in 3 > years or so ?) > > David > > On Jul 14, 3:01 am, Bruce Johnson <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > > > GWT 1.7 is a minor update that adds better support for Internet Explorer > 8, > > Firefox 3.5, and Safari 4. Each of these new browser versions introduced > at > > least one change that negatively impacted compiled GWT modules, so we > > recommend that you do update to GWT 1.7 and recompile your existing > > applications to ensure that they work with the latest versions of > browsers. > > No source code changes on your part should be required. > > > > Normally, a minor update such as this would have been named 1.6.5 (the > > previous latest version of GWT was 1.6.4), but we did add the value "ie8" > to > > the "user.agent" deferred binding property, which could impact projects > > using custom deferred binding rules that are sensitive to that property. > > Thus, we went with GWT 1.7 rather than GWT 1.6.5, to indicate that you > may > > need to pay attention to that change. Details are in the release notes. > > > > In every other respect, this is just a bugfix release, so in the vast > > majority of cases, the update-recompile process should be nearly > effortless. > > > > Download here: > http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/downloads/list?can=1&q=GW... > > > > Cheers, > > Bruce, on behalf of your friendly GWT Team > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
