IE7- It's about time

[CoBB]

It needs a bit of thinking, but it's naturally possible. The aforementioned MSN home page is also a tableless design, and it has about the same complexity.

[benryves]

To use divs on a very organized page which would require extensive tables, one could write a script that generates pages from XML layout-sheets with blocks of text that you merge with decorations etc. A sort of layer between the designers view and the ugly world of mid/low-level implementation. That's a rather hefty project I admit, but you know my interest for solving things in cool ways I dunno how the site creation utilities work that I've heard about, maybe this is what they do?

If you look at my site, [www.benryves.com] you'll notice a very heavy dependancy on tables. Each of those fancy similar-looking tables are actually built from a single PHP function that echoes the HTML onto the page. All I then have to do is build a basic table for the layout of the site and then call the table-building function inside the cells where it then nests the tables neatly. It makes fixing the layout between browsers a LOT easier. In fact, I developed entirely in IE and then tested in Firefox and there wasn't a single difference!

[CoBB]

Why is this dependency? It's just a way to achieve it. This layout is perfectly feasible even without tables. The hardest part is the actual 3-column layout, and I had no problem reproducing that with CSS on my site (were it not for the borders, the alignment would even look flawless on IE6). Fancy edges and everything can be done too, have a look at www.doxdesk.com for instance.

[CrimsonCasio]

for those of you that want a tabbed version of IE here's your answer: http://avantbrowser.com/

this uses the IE engine to render pages but has lots of nice features IE doesnt have. so pages should show up as they do in IE (it does sometimes have problems with secure logins though)

[currahee]

MYIE2 has tabbed.

[DJ_O]

Avant browser definitively look pretty cool. It has a lot of option. The only downside is that you can't type key words in the address bar like IE and it use yahoo search engine instead of google.

[benryves]

MYIE2 has tabbed.

I think it's now called Maxthon.
I find Maxthon a little too cluttered - after all, it's just a browser. There are only so many things you need it to do...
I'll stick to a combo of IE6 and Firefox for the moment. It seems to work fine.
Of course, I also use Lynx...

[CrimsonCasio]

@Kevin: actually, at least the version im using has google searching.