IE7 & SVG

Anyone know if IE7 will support and display Scalable Vector Graphics?

I believe on the roadmap they said it would on the IE blog...maybe check that out?

Cybermagellan wrote:

I believe on the roadmap they said it would on the IE blog...maybe check that out?

Searched the IE blog with no results.

FXEF wrote:

Anyone know if IE7 will support and display Scalable Vector Graphics?

No, unless you use a 3rd party plugin (just like IE6).

SVG is not part of the plan for IE7. This is definitely something we are looking at for a future release though.

The IE team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie is doing a pretty good job of explaining the feature set of IE7 with additional documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie

If you want to hear more about the future of IE then you should come to Mix06 www.mix06.com where Dean Hachamovitch the General Manager of IE will be giving a talk called "The Future of IE". There will also be IE team members including myself at the conference. I'll be helping in the IE7 Compatibility lab where we will be helping people prepare websites for IE7 and collecting feedback.

Thanks
-Dave

Does that mean we'll see SVG support in IE8 that'll come out 2014? Or will there be way shorter release cycles after IE7 went final? Right now I'm reasoning the damn long beta cycles on the idea that there's major plumbing going on.

Tom Servo wrote:

Does that mean we'll see SVG support in IE8 that'll come out 2014? Or will there be way shorter release cycles after IE7 went final? Right now I'm reasoning the damn long beta cycles on the idea that there's major plumbing going on.

Tom,
We've said several times now that you can expect IE to return to much more frequent and regular releases. Over the last couple of years we've built a great team and continue to hire and grow that team so that we can deliver future versions of IE. We know that while IE7 is shaping up to be a great release there is no shortage of further work to do

Thanks
-Dave

DMassy wrote:

SVG is not part of the plan for IE7. This is definitely something we are looking at for a future release though.

My bad....it's Alpha transparency with PNGs that I was thinking about. Sorry

DMassy wrote:

SVG is not part of the plan for IE7. This is definitely something we are looking at for a future release though.

Thanks
-Dave

I was hoping IE7 would support SVG now that Firefox 1.5 supports SVG with no plug-ins. SVG is a great format for web graphics, especially web logos. SVG files are text, therefore can be indexed by search bots. I just hope the IE team sees the need for SVG and support it soon.

Thanks,
FXEF

The Adobe SVG plugin is better than the SVG support in firefox...  and now I can't use it.

CannotResolveSymbol wrote:

The Adobe SVG plugin is better than the SVG support in firefox...  and now I can't use it.

It doesn't matter that the Adobe plug-in is better. The average joe IE user is not going to install a plug-in to view web graphics, they need to be rendered by the browser. Until IE supports SVG, it would be senseless to use them in webpages.

FXEF

FXEF wrote:

It doesn't matter that the Adobe plug-in is better. The average joe IE user is not going to install a plug-in to view web graphics, they need to be rendered by the browser. Until IE supports SVG, it would be senseless to use them in webpages.

Actually, the "average joe" user does have Adobe's plugin installed, it comes with Acrobat Reader.

FXEF wrote:

CannotResolveSymbol wrote:The Adobe SVG plugin is better than the SVG support in firefox...  and now I can't use it.

It doesn't matter that the Adobe plug-in is better. The average joe IE user is not going to install a plug-in to view web graphics, they need to be rendered by the browser. Until IE supports SVG, it would be senseless to use them in webpages.

FXEF

Ummm... then what's flash?

W3bbo wrote:

FXEF wrote: It doesn't matter that the Adobe plug-in is better. The average joe IE user is not going to install a plug-in to view web graphics, they need to be rendered by the browser. Until IE supports SVG, it would be senseless to use them in webpages.

Actually, the "average joe" user does have Adobe's plugin installed, it comes with Acrobat Reader.

We only have one web app (that I know of) that I know of that uses SVG, and we have had to manually install the Adobe SVG plugin on any machine that uses it.  All machines have Acrobat Reader installed, so either our installer group has excluded the SVG support or it is not there.

In any case, Adobe is discontinueing its SVG plugin, and it is not 100% compatable with Vista.

The IE team will have to hurry things up a bit... the first time I used SVG on a web site was in 2000. That is 6 years ago! Then there was also talks about how long Microsoft will take to wake up and spell the roses. I suppose if a technology does not tighten the knot between the end user and Microsoft, that such a technology is not important to them. It does not serve Microsoft, so why bother. SVG is used on millions of phones out there, television sets, gaming consoles and yeah, also pc browsers. That's why companies like Opera is doing so well - they actually listen to the people out there and they don't give a stuff for standards. SIX years people!!!

If you think implementing SVG in a browser is difficult... ask Andrew Girrow from TinyLine how he managed to implement the SVG Mobile 1.2 spec all by himself? By the way, there is a applet available from his site that you can plug into your site to allow users to view SVG Mobile on your site..... but your visitors using IE will probably not have Java supported....... If the IE team one day decides to stop swimming upstream, then live could become much easier for us developers. In the meantime..... I vote for Opera

SVG is not used in phones, tv's, gaming consoles or browsers.

Adobe are discontinuing support for SVG viewer on Jan 1st 2008, the reason being that SVG support is integrated into FireFox 2.0.

More here: http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html

Obviously this is a bit of a pain because SVG is used a lot in my company and IE is our standard browser and yes there is enough of an ROI case to make everyone migrate.