Last week was “Internet Explorer 6 Week” for the Hula web client team. We made a lot of progress in bringing the Dragonfly experience on IE6 closer to that of Firefox. There are still many IE issues, but it works well enough that someone could take it for a spin and find useful bugs to report to us.
We still recommend Hula testers use Firefox 1.5 to get the full Dragonfly experience. While we will support IE 6, Dragonfly will never be as attractive there as it will in our other supported browsers: Firefox 1.5+, Safari 2+, and IE7. It is simply not worth the time to work around IE6’s CSS issues when IE7 fixes many of them and will be supplied as an automatic update to Windows users around the time Hula is ready for its first release. And though it won’t look as good Dragonfly should work well on IE6 (and 7, which should look as good as Firefox).
Also this week, Jacob took about 30% off the month calendar view rendering time with a number of performance optimizations, including making date formatting 10 times faster in many situations. Date formatting is important in just about every screen in Dragonfly, since every mail message and calendar event has dates and times associated with it. These performance improvements are cross-browser, but they are particular noticable on IE, which executes javascript slower than Firefox. We’ve only begun to optimize for performance, so there is likely a lot more we can do to speed things up.
