Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Internet Explorer 7

I've installed the IE7 beta and am quite impressed.... it looks nice, the tabbed browsing works well and some of the rethinking they've done (e.g. hiding some of the menus, etc) is ahead of Firefox.

However, I still don't like the search functionality - I much prefer firefox's "active" find that jumps around the page as you enter the text you're searching for.

I've encountered a few pages that don't load with IE7 (they check for IE6 and will only run on IE6). I found this patch very useful:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/support/default.mspx

The third question contains a link to a registry hack to make it switch between IE7 and IE6 modes.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Reading the information about IE 7 it sounds like they really have just taken many of the Firefox ideas on board (about time many would say). The 2 reasons for sticking with Firefox still remain:

a) It's open source
b) It works on platforms other than Windows

As a Linux user, the last one of these is fairly important!

Richard Brown said...

You're certainly right that they've copied a lot of Firefox's ideas. But then Firefox also knicked loads of theirs (e.g. the security bar that slides into view at the top of the page at various points).

I find Firefox less stable than IE but only marginally.

I read today that IE7 will be pushed to Windows users via Windows Update. That, combined with its prettier look and feel, make me suspect it will be quite successful.

We'll see :-)

Anonymous said...

Lets just hope that Firefox's raft of extensions and plugins and their better support for web standards and new technologies such as XUL and SVG keep Firefox as the browser of choice.

IE upping its game can only be good for browser competition and the major winner in this is the brower user.