Third beta released PIE 1.0

_{Preface translator. PIE's “crutch” allows you to easily and confidently provide support for a whole range of CSS3 features in IE6, IE7 and IE8 browsers (which, in this sense, without a “crutch”, turn out to be “lame” to misery) , and in this capacity it was mentioned more than once on Habrahabr (last time - January 13, 2011 ). I decided to translate the following, albeit not new, announcement (the release of PIE 1.0 beta 3 took place on December 6, 2010) in order to explicitly convey once again to all interested readers the news that this year PIE comes in updated and improved. To all those who first started using PIE last fall or summer, it is time to think hard, first, about upgrading PIE (in the name of speeding up websites), and second, about mastering new, December features and capabilities of PIE.}

She prepared for a long time, but the third beta of PIE 1.0 is finally out! This release contains many changes; Here are some of the major improvements in it:

• Speed! - The biggest and most noticeable improvement in this release was speed. As a result of extensive profiling, the slowest parts of the PIE code execution were found, and many of them were optimized. The results are staggering: the PIE speed has increased up to four times in comparison with the second beta, especially noticeable in IE8. And it will bring the acceleration of page processing and you, and readers of your sites!
  
• Lazy initialization - Even with all the improvements in speed, if your page is very long, it may contain hundreds of PIE elements, which in total will lead to a noticeable delay. However, there is a chance that only a few of them are visible in the view window initially (after the page loads), then why waste time processing the other elements that are not visible right now? Now you can set the special property -pie-lazy-init: true in CSS, and thus postpone the initialization of all PIE-infected elements outside the visible area of ​​the loaded page. They will be initialized and displayed after the reader pushes the page to them.
  
• PIE.js: separate version in javascript - Now there are two ways to use PIE: traditional (PIE.htc and behavior) and new (separate javascript file PIE.js). Although specifying the .htc file and the behavior property will remain the recommended approach, the JS version allows you to use PIE in some situations in which the behavior is not able to work. Check out the PIE.js documentation for details on when and how you might want to resort to the JS version.
  
• Works with tabular elements - Now applying PIE to <table>, <th> and <td> elements leads to correct processing and henceforth does not threaten with an infinite loop.
  
• Works with images - Now you can use PIE to round the corners of <img> elements.
  
• -pie-png-fix - Now you can use PIE as a general PNG alpha transparency fix for IE6, using the new special CSS property -pie-png-fix: true. Details are provided in the documentation for -pie-png-fix. This functionality was provided by Felix Gnass .
  
• Disabled in IE9 - Since IE9 independently supports many of the same properties and CSS3 values ​​as PIE, and since it is not yet clear what IE9 will support in the final version, for the time being PIE will be disabled when working in IE9; this temporary solution will be reviewed as events unfold.
  
• position: fixed - Now PIE places its display elements correctly when applied to elements with the position: fixed property (this does not apply to IE6, since IE6 does not support the position: fixed property on its own).
  
• Print - Now PIE independently eliminates all its elements while printing a page. In addition to eliminating a number of problems with the display, such self-elimination also does not neglect the user settings about the non-printing of backgrounds and provides ink savings.
  
• Many other fixes and improvements - see the code edit logs .

Download PIE 1.0 beta 3 now!

I want to thank the PIE user community for reporting errors (and helping to debug them) on the forums , for your generous donations to support PIE life, for your enthusiasm in spreading knowledge about PIE in your circle. It is so exciting to watch how my little crazy side project spreads quickly and gains many happy users!