Internet Explorer 7 Released

October 19th, 2006 | by Todd W |

Follow the links to go get a copy, if you are so inclined.  I’m probably going to stick with Firefox.

  1. One Response to “Internet Explorer 7 Released”

  2. By C on Oct 19, 2006 | Reply

    IE7 is the best IE to date, but it is still inferior to Firefox in a few areas:

    Speed - It is slower to load pages, and to load itself.

    Tabs - It does tabs, but it has troble understanding that you might want to automatically save those open tabs and see them when you open IE again. It also moves you to the next rightmost tab if you close one. This is bad, because when you open a popup (and have it set to open a tab instead), then you are done with that popup and want to see what you were doing before you instead get sent to the next item down the line. Firefox doesn’t do this.

    Interface - IE7 is supposedly more “clean” with almost no visible buttons or menus. THis is cool for a web kiosk, but I like seeing big “Forward” “Back” and “Reload” buttons. The “Reload” button being the size of a Quick Launch icon is pretty stupid. Also, the reload button is very far away from the forward and back buttons, which means far too much ousing for my tastes.

    Passwords and Form Data - I got used to Firefox plugging in my Amazon, eBay, and e-mail data for me automatically. IE won’t, and though it can remember passwords it needs prodding to actually bring them up for use, unlike Firefox.

    On a related note, Windows Vista is gorgeous. It has a lot of stupid and annoying junk, but for a modern system and a typical user it should be a massive improvement in the interface. Since most people don’t peek under the hood, and would kill things if they could, maybe the fact that it takes many menus and confirmations to do basic tasks like run anything from a command prompt isn’t such a bad thing.

    Searches are better thanks to indexing, but I can’t navigate things as well as I used to with just browsing folders. Vista wants to throw all my music or pictures into massive search folders. To actually organize them seems very difficult. Properties and metatags seem to be the way Microsoft wants us to think of our files from now on, instead of by location. Personally, I like my folder trees.

    So in short, both IE7 and Vista are gorgeous and flashy, but no where near the quantumn leap Windows XP offered over Windows 98. Stay away until the Service Pack.

    Incidentally, there are simple programs out there to reset the Product Activation clock which will kill your box in 30 days if you don’t activate.

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