It’s been a long time coming, but PIE 1.0 beta 3 is finally out! A lot has gone into this release; the major improvements include:
- Performance! – The biggest single improvement in this release is performance. Extensive profiling was done to identify the slowest parts of PIE’s execution, and optimizations were added for many of them. The results are astounding: PIE is now up to four times as fast as beta2, especially noticeable in IE8. This means snappier page loads for you and your users!
- Lazy Initialization – Even with all the performance improvements, if your page is very long it may have hundreds of PIE’d elements, and this can add up to a noticeable delay. However, chances are that only a small portion of those elements are visible in the viewport on initial page load, so why waste time rendering all the others that aren’t visible right away? You can now specify the custom
-pie-lazy-init:true;property in your CSS, which will delay initialization of any PIE’d elements that are outside the viewport on page load. They will be initialized and rendered once they scroll into view. - PIE.js: standalone JavaScript version – There are now two ways to use PIE: the traditional PIE.htc behavior, and a new PIE.js standalone JavaScript file. While the .htc behavior is still the recommended approach, the JS version will allow using PIE in some situations where the behavior can not work. See the PIE.js documentation for details on when and how you might want to use the JS version.
- Works on table elements – Applying PIE to <table>, <th>, and <td> elements now renders properly and no longer results in an infinite loop.
- Works on images – You can now use PIE to round the corners of <img> elements.
- -pie-png-fix – You can now use PIE as a generic PNG alpha transparency fix for IE6, using the new
-pie-png-fix:truecustom CSS property. See the -pie-png-fix documentation for more details. This feature was contributed by Felix Gnass. - Disabled in IE9 – As IE9 has native support for many of the same CSS3 as PIE, and it’s not yet clear what it will support in its final version, for the time being PIE has been disabled when loaded in IE9. This will be reevaluated as things unfold.
- position:fixed – PIE now positions its rendering elements properly when used on elements with
position:fixed(does not apply to IE6 since it doesn’t support position:fixed natively.) - Printing – PIE now removes itself from all elements when the page is printed. Besides avoiding many rendering problems, this also allows the user’s printing preferences regarding backgrounds to be honored and avoid wasting ink.
- Lots of other fixes and improvements – see the full commit log.
I’d like to thank the PIE user community for reporting and helping debug issues in the forums, for your generous donations to help keep PIE alive, and for so enthusiastically promoting PIE amongst your peers. It’s been a thrill to see this crazy little side project of mine spread so quickly and gain so many happy users!
