The GWT team has announced the 1.7 release of the Google Web Toolkit. Bruce Johnson published some details on this release:
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.
In the discussion following this announcement a user mentioned that the GWT team focuses on supporting IE6 and IE8 right now, with no emphasis on support for IE7. Joel Webber from the GWT team explained the reason:
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:
- 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.
In the Ajax world the whole IE browser family causes so much extra work for the various developers working on toolkits and JavaScript libraries. Makes me think that Silverlight – besides being a full media plugin – is Microsoft’s way of keeping their own developers away from the IE mess.
With the maturity of the GWT, will Google start building more applications with that framework in the future? GoogleWave looked very promising already.
