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Internet Explorer 7 is great
I hadn't been anticipating the new browser with very much enthusiasm but now I have it I am really rather impressed!
Previously I have used a combination of IE6 and Firefox. Firefox is great for tabs and security but it falls down on some aspects of rendering such as opening a page with the text so small you can't see it, and with the large text too large and the small text too small. It never seems to display a page the way it was intended.
But at least you can enlarge or reduce a page quickly with the mouse wheel (Ctrl-wheel). Further when you increase the size of the text Firefox increases all the text but leaves the tables and frames the same size so you inevitably get overflow on things like navigation lists. IE6 at least displays pages with text in the right proportions but it won't increase the size of text specified in points or other fixed sizes.
There are still very many pages with fixed sizes specified across the page making those with very small text impossible for some of us to read, so we don't, we go somewhere else.
IE7 solves all these problems and adds some very nice wrinkles as well. The zoom facility, quite distinct from text size which remains, is quite brilliant because it increases/decreases the whole page, frames, tables and pictures included, by 10% per click or roll of the Ctrl-wheel. You can still set the text size to any of the same five sizes we had before but if you use zoom the text size is reset to medium. This has solved all my readability problems in one go. IE7 is essential for this one feature alone.
But then there are other goodies. Everyone is waiting for tabs. But what we get is not just tabs. There are useful variations controlled by the use of the Ctrl, Shift and Ctrl-Shift keys when you click on a link. And then there are some extra buttons on the tab line. To the left of the first tab there are two buttons.
The first is an excellent feature which displays a small image of every tabbed page; click on the one you want and it opens. You can also close tabs from here. Next is a button that displays a list of the tabs; click on the page you want. To the right of the tabs is a button to open a new blank tab.
When you first open IE7 you will realise that the command lines at the top are not quite the usual Microsoft style. Most obviously there is no command line with the usual File Edit View ... But it's still there if you really want it - just touch the Alt key and it will be inserted, but on the second line down rather than at the top where we are more used to seeing it.
Using Alt gives you one chance at selecting a command. as soon as you click anywhere on the screen the command line will disappear. If you want to fix it then click on Tools, Menu Bar - Tools is permanently displayed on the tab line as well as being in the command line. Slightly confusingly each Tools menu contains a different selection of items, some common to both, some unique to each. Another oddity is the editing limitations - in the list of functions under the Page button you can Edit with Microsoft Office Word, but with nothing else. View Source still uses Notepad which is not a lot of use. We could do with a facility to set our preferred web page editor as a default.
Another serious weakness in all earlier versions of IE has also be solved - printing. Now you can print any page and know that it will fit within the width of the paper. IE7 shrinks the page down to fit the width. But it doesn't shrink quite the same way for print as it zooms for the screen which is unfortunate. When it shrinks for the printer it does not reduce the size of pictures. So if you have a picture in a frame, for instance, it'll chop the right hand side off the picture if it needs to reduce the width of the frame. Pity that. The solution is to print in landscape.
There is an option to print each frame cell separately and to select which cell if you don't want them all - Print, Print Preview accesses all the options.
IE is, I think, widely used by other Microsoft products and I have noticed some side effects. Outlook seems to be the most affected. All the text is being displayed slightly heavier - in IE7 as well incidentally - and on the Outlook Today screen the links to folders listed under the Messages header simply don't work any more, though clicking on Messages itself opens the Inbox. I also noticed that my keyboard went to the US layout after installing IE7. On inspection in Control Panel, Regional and Language Options, Languages, Details I found both English (UK) and English (USA) configured. Deleting the US version corrected the problem. This is only a Beta release so hopefully these small problems will be resolved before the final version.
All in all a very great improvement - I hope the security is as much improved too. I have now ditched Firefox and I'm using only IE7 on each of my machines.
Tim Boddington
I was unhappy to discover that self designed icons no longer appeared, and the locations were replaced by the normal MS logo.
I fail to see why this should happen.
Posted by Cliff | August 5, 2006 12:00 AM
I pretty much hate IE. First and foremost, a browser is supposed to serve web pages and allow you to BROWSE the internet. However, the fat cats at M$ decided to ignore many of the W3C standards, resulting in a browser that doesn't actually render some standards compliant websites correctly - therefore de-valuing the meaning of the word 'browser' with respect to IE.
The only reason it's popular is because 80% of computer users don't actually know how to download a better browser (such as Firefox), which for us web developers is a nightmare as we unfortunately need to constantly ensure that our designs render correctly in IE, a non-standards browser.
Posted by Engles | June 18, 2007 4:18 PM
Ditching Firefox for IE7!!???
How very dare you.
IE7 is nothing more than a turd with icing on it.
It doesn't even come close to rendering things correctly and in fact 5 minutes ago I had to change some HTML markup that worked perfectly on opera,safari,firefox just because IE7 wouldn't render the floats correctly. It is POO! Besides this, many of the latest 'wizz bang' editions to the browser are blatant rip offs from competitor browsers (e.g. Firefox, Opera tabbed windows). Also Microsoft should be fined heavily for including it as part of their operating system - a disgusting monopoly tactic. Shame on all you IE7 users. Also, Gran Paradiso is going to make IE7 look like an even smellier turd.
Posted by brudinie | October 11, 2007 9:45 AM