Internet Explorer 7 and CSS - at least a bit better

As you've probably read, Microsoft has released a first public preview of the Internet Explorer 7 a few days ago.
As I've been interested in webdesign for quite a long time, I was often worried that you couldn't use a bunch of possibilities in modern HTML code, because the nearly monopoly browser doesn't support them. Microsoft has not done any development on the IE for several years. When Firefox started to endanger the market share of the IE, they decided to change their mind.

Now I had the chance to have a first look at the IE7 on a friends laptop. I won't comment on the interface improvements, cause I wouldn't seriously suggest anyone to use this browser. I'm only interested from a webdesigners perspective, because I know that despite of all the buzz about Firefox, still a lot of people use the »default« on their system without thinking about it and probably will continue to do so.

I held a bunch of html/css test-cases for a while with examples I faced due to my webdesign work and found out that they don't work in some browsers.
A quick note: IE7 will behave completely as crappy as before if your docs have a HTML 4 doctype declaration. So to check the new css features, define XHTML 1.1 in your doctype and IE7 will use a »strict-mode« to render your pages.
The features I was missing most in the past are finally implemented: Transparent PNGs, fixed-positioned objects and defining objects through their left and right distance.
Beside that, there are still a bunch of features missing, min-height, max-height, empty-cells, just to name some. In my test-cases, it couldn't compete with any other browser, although they may be not representative. If you have suggestions for enhancements to the test-cases, feel free to mail me or post them.
My blog looks quite okay, some minor bug with the top black line, maybe I'll investigate this further (well, maybe not, maybe you just shouldn't use IE to watch this page ;-) ). Acid2 looks crappy as before.

So as a conclusion, IE7 has fixed the most grave issues, but is far away from fully implementing CSS2. If the free browsers want to enlarge their ledge over IE, I'm still waiting for the first browser to call CSS2-complete.
I hope this can be a chance to come a step forward in webdesign. For the future, the CSS3 previews looks very promising, I hope it won't take as many years as CSS2 till browser developers will take care about it.