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IE7 From a Firefox User's Perspective
Buertio writes, "A week with IE takes a look at IE7 from the perspective of a long-time Firefox user. The verdict? Microsoft has come a long way but still has some way to go before taking on Firefox and Opera."
I'll agree with the author on a number of things. Most critical is that IE7 requiring XP or later is an opportunity for other browsers, particularly Firefox and Opera. The majority of Windows users out there are on XP, but Windows 2000 and Windows 98 are sizable minorities. I know one site's stats aren't enough to judge the whole internet by, but my own site, with ~92% Windows users, shows 83% on XP, 5% on Win2k, 2.2% on Win98, and 1% on WinME. (That 1% on Windows Me is scary -- I'd almost rather run Windows 98.)
Firefox will go through the same thing next year, since Firefox 3 won't run on Windows 98 or Me, but it'll still run on Windows 2000. Of course, that's another 8-10 months for some users to upgrade (those percentages are about a third of what they were a year ago) -- and if you've gotten them hooked on Firefox while they're on Win98, they'll probably stick with it when they move to a new machine with XP/Vista. And in a year or two, as IE7 supplants IE6 and websites start targeting it, those holdout Windows 98 users might decide they're better off with a slightly-outdated Firefox 2 than a massively-outdated IE6.
We are really concerned that the forced (unless you take action) ie7 upgrade will break some business apps.
Such as Oracle's Jinitiator.
...yup...
This article was so bias.
I said it before and I'll say it again: the Internet Explorer brand is tarnished. No matter how great Microsoft makes IE in terms of functionality and security, most, if not all who have switched to Firefox or Opera (or Safari if they just went out and bought a Mac) have already made up their minds about IE.
All Microsoft can hope to do at this point is prevent more users from switching away, but that'll only work so long as IE7 doesn't become an exploitfest like its mildly-retarded predecessor. The next year or so will determine that as more IE6 users and malware authors migrate to IE7.
No mention of the fantastic RSS reader that comes built-in with IE7.
You talk as if IE isnt the most used browser out there...
/me waits for troll comments :P
"but still has some way to go before taking on Firefox and Opera"
Well, considering it has the majority market share, it looks like they need to do nothing. They've already won the battle, it's up to Firefox and Opera to take on them.
firefox has a dtd bug in xml it hasn't fixed for years: it doesn't reference external entities
9
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6979
and opera flat out just doesn't support xsl formatting
http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/#xml
nevermind ie7, ie6 does both, just fine
in my book, as an xml/ xsl programmer, ie is light years ahead of firefox and opera
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The article does not reflect the Memory consumption of each of the browsers. Unless, you tweak the firefox, it hogs a memory a lot when multiple tabs are open.
Microsoft has come a long way but still has some way to go before taking on Firefox and Opera.
I can't speak to Opera, by Firefox 1.5 crashes on me much more than IE6 ever did (based on experience with two different machines), and my experience with IE7 is that it is solid. And some sites using fancy forms (for example, my LinkSys/Cisco home router) don't work with FF at all.
Don't get me wrong, Firefox is still my default browser (I'm using it now), but by some meterics IE is more than a match.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
The drawback is that if IE ever gets usable it will be more difficult to make people switch to Firefox, they will just stick with IE because it works.
Yet Another Personal Blog
I love firefox for a great many things, but I'm not your average user (neither is 99.9% of slashdot readers). I think for Joe user, there is less of a case for Firefox than before, now that IE7 is out. I still definately think there is a case to move to Firefox, but now that IE7 has tabs, it's a tougher sell. I recommend all my users/friends/etc to switch to Firefox, but now that IE7 is out, it will be a harder sell once IE7 makes it's way on most machines. Security, functionality, and ease of use are all as high as ever on IE7.
I think with IE7 the ball is back in Firefox's court to try to convice Joe User why Firefox is better. Before IE7, this was a no-brainer.
It's both good and bad that IE7 may be, in a sense, a wildcard. For one, it's good because those not running XP may switch to Firefox, as Kelson mentioned. The bad part is not that the masses who will use it will get a bad internet experience: IE7 should be fine for most people's internet needs (and wants). It's the fact that once the masses continue to take up IE7, Microsoft's potential whims on HTML code, and especially CSS, will have to become normal or else many will *gasp* become inconvenienced.
Back when Netscape was around en bloc and layers were the norm for many users, it was hell to code for both Netscape and Explorer, and often websites were split into two sections. So if Microsoft is trying to create a new and "better" standard, I don't fear Microsoft; I fear the complaining masses. The burden of being the (relatively) knowledgeable minority!
I installed IE7 out of curiousity the other day. I use firefox but my wife uses IE. One thing that was immediately clear to me was that IE had substantially improved their text renderer. Text rendered in IE is substantially more readable and easy on the eyes than either IE6 or FF. If you don't believe me, try it within FF using IE tabs. Any idea on what they did to make the text so readable and how we get FF to render like this?
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
I always refer to the Mozilla© products as "fucking gay communist bullshit", especially when one of my employees uses it unauthorized (luckily, I have surveillance-tools installed on every machine, in case someone does something private during her working time). I mean, Internet Explorer is the standard for all web protocols, so why change it? I credit the efforts of the former Netscape employees who really try to use their time of unemployment to create something useful, but they just keep on missing the needs of their target audience. Perhaps Netscape could provide them with their newest code instead of letting them just reuse their obsolete Netscape 4.x code. Who knows.
This leaves us waiting for Windows® Vista©, which will once again set a new standard in productivity.
Uhg... Microsoft's implementation of RSS feeds sucks so bad.
/., Wired, Woot, and all the other places I just don't have time to visit.
I enjoy FireFox's live bookmarks because it gives me a quick and screen friendly way of scanning stories on sites like BBC,
Microsoft's Answer: display as a normal website with prettier formatting - and advertisements.
One saving grace for IE 7's implemenation of RSS feeds - it syncs them with Outlook 2007, where I can scan them easily as if they were email messages.
My verdict? Firefox still wins this match.
The IE team sent a congratulatory cake to firefox to celebrate shipping success.,br>0 /fromredmondwithlove.jpg
http://fredericiana.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/1
It has an erie deja vu feeling of when Apple put an ad out welcoming IBM to the PC market.
It's both good and bad that IE7 may be, in a sense, a wildcard. For one, it's good because those not running XP may switch to Firefox, as Kelson mentioned. The bad part is not that the masses who will use it will get a bad internet experience: IE7 should be fine for most people's internet needs (and wants). It's the fact that once the masses continue to take up IE7, Microsoft's potential whims on HTML code, and especially CSS, will have to become normal or else many will *gasp* become inconvenienced.
Actually, its the growth in apple, plus a bit of linux, plus win 2k/98, etc that will drive things the other way.
Firefox is the only single browser that runs everwhere. Easier to develop your website on that; once IE drops below 80% Firefox starts to get very attractive as an option.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
I went to getfirefox and lo and behold by removing the version number for 1.5 and putting 2.0 in ala:m l?product=firefox-2.0&os=win&lang=en-US
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.ht
I started downloading it.
(Mind you it is really slow and stopped at 33kb)
[disclaimer: this could have snuck in FF 2RC3 and I wouldn't have known... I only tested RC2, and don't see this feature in the RC3 release notes]
:-)
FireFox 2 lacks page zooming, which from a my perspective is impossible to live without on certain displays.
I'm a web developer (sometimes), and I love FireFox. As a developer I love FireFox because the Gecko team show consistent progress towards standards. From this perspective, FireFox is what the web should be. The worst thing about developing for FireFox is... writing broken code with comment hacks to support IE's nonstandard ways. But that's not FireFox's fault.
For DEMO or home theater purposes, FireFox is (on a high-res display) very very unusable.
Why?
FireFox 2 has no page Zoom. FireFox offers unchanged as a featurem plain old "Text zoom", which is not the same.
The fact that many pages don't scale to different resolutions well is not FireFox's fault.
But until all websites adopt a consistent method of page scaling, the workaround is going to be Page Zoom.
On a 42" LCD (1920x1080p), a fullscreen FireFox browser is legible from about 3 feet away (with my eyes).
If you make the text bigger, the page layout goes toast in FF. SURE, you can go in and change your video resolution to a non-native size and cause everything to get bigger, but that is not fun and it messes with other apps. The solution for now is some kind of liner scaling on the page.
On a 42" LCD (1920x1080p), a fullscreen Opera browser is legible from about 6 feet away (with my eyes), if you use Page Zoom of 180-200%. 200% really isn't needed, but there's some annoying artifacing In Opera if you resize at a factor of 1.8. 2x looks very nice!
I see IE has page zoom now, and I've done a little bit of testing. It seems no better than opera's at first glance. But it's THERE.
I'll continue rooting for FireFox privately, but it's hard to sell people on FireFox's importance... when you have to use Opera or MSIE on the big panel display.
Here's to FF 2.5 including this feature. One hopes!
As a web developer and designer, my biggest worry is that a significant proportion of my target audience (too large to ignore) will be stuck with IE6 for the forseable future, and that will further complicate the development process.
I doubt that many people who aren't running XP will switch to Firefox - the likelihood is that anyone in that situation who hasn't already switched won't understand and won't care.
The developers of Firefox focus on high priority bugs, that's why they don't care about xml bugs, especially if it won't jeopardise the security of Firefox. Microsoft doesn't mind any kind of bug whether it is critical or not. http://www.cybertopcops.com/
www.cybertopcops.com
Que?
Sorry, but the GUI of IE7 is like someone without any knowledge of HCI or how people use browsers or PCs in general is responsible for the disaster that is IE7.
They had a clean slate to work with, and could have produced something truly intuitive, and highly usable, but instead they produce something which is only half a step away from dogshit. Honestly, separating the functional buttons is just stupid. To me, it appears that absolutely no research was done for the GUI, and they only spent money on the back end, and the graphics.
Removing the file menu is retarded.
So, to me, it doesn't matter how good IE7 is behind the curtains, the curtains themselves suck so bad that I simply will not use it.
The sad thing is that I'm not the least surprised by this: a unique opportunity completely missed, and Internet usability has been set back by at least a couple of years.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Is there such a thing? It's still a child. It's not yet two years since the 1.0 release. I'd installed Firebird about a year before that. Before that it was the browser component of mozilla, and then way back it was netscape navigator! Essentially the interface is no different from it's ancestors. Much of what we like about Firefox is really the extensions (adblock, decent tab functionality) or disabled by default (find as you type) - and all this was upstream in Mozilla. The greatest distinction between Firefox/mozilla/etc and IE is the tabs, and frankly this is apalling "out the box" without any extensions. Multiple tabs, one window: fantastic. Multiple windows of IE = alright. Firefox "out the box" multiple tabs in multiple windows, new ones coming from nowhere all shapes and sizes = Confusing as hell. It's hardly surprising new users want to disable it, when they must guess at random what opens a window, what opens a tab.
The majority of the older mozilla userbase is on linux, think back to when mozilla was the default browser in debian, red hat, suse. only with firefox 1.0 did the development shift from this technical userbase to the hysterical evangelicals of firefox vs IE.
The application either works on my platform or it doesn't. If it works on my platform then I'll use it... otherwise I'll pass. The platform issue is moot... sort of like saying the iLife suite is bad because it doesn't work on my PC.
On the otherhand, close integration between the OS and the browser can make for a more seamless experience (and DOJ interactions). IE 7 works on 75+% of the PCs in the world and probably nearly 100% of the PCs in companies with more than 500 employees.
I mean:
and:
Ignore this signature. By order.
Good: Tabbed browsing, full page zooming, quick tab view, improved security alerts.
.00001% of the time.
;-)
... Some support for performance would be nice (loading times etc.)
... Of course, it has an option to never show this again but some people just habitually hit OK when they see a di
Bad: Non-standard user interface, very limited customization, very limited platform support
Non-standard interface? Who's standard?
Limited customistation - ok you might have a point here. But honestly what do we need tool bars for?
Limited platform support !? What do you expect. You can't possibly list this as a con (well I guess you just did, but let be reasonable)
One of the biggest mistakes Microsoft made was dropping Windows 2000 support for IE so soon.
Why, w2k is 6 years old. That's old. In addition it is the last unencumbered version of windows, it is also going to be EOL'd soon. From a software developer perspective, I don't want people using w2k, it's old, and dirty.
fairly minimal interface, however, once you open a few tabs this interface starts to look cluttered because of the buttons placed along the right side of the tab bar... The menu bar is missing by default which further adds to the confusion. To make it appear hit ALT or right click on the toolbar and enable the menu bar.
First, it is a minimal interface. I think MS finally figured out that IT'S A WEB BROWSER. The browser is for browsing pages and that's really all the browser needs to do, contain pages. No really, why is a menu needed by default? I applaud this shift. There is no need to loose 30px of real estate to a menu that is used
As fot tabs; if they get croweded you can do one of three things. Open a new window with a new group of tabs. Not open so many tabs, I mean after all you can only usefully use one page at a time. Change the bar arrangement.
liked the thumbnail view of open tabs, however it'd be good to see the thumbnails scale so that if there's only a few tabs open they'd be larger and many tabs open they'd be smaller to reduce the need for scrolling
Man, everyone is a critic. My guess is scaling each page image dynamically would hurt performance. you'll notice that they are live previews of the pages (the refresh and stuff).
Also IE7 has gained a search bar much like most other browsers. By default it's set to Windows Live Search (aka MSN) but changing the default is as simple as clicking the dropdown arrow and installing a new search engine. It's a shame that there's not more choice in the default list but to be fair they've made it fairly simple to add new search engines. So the first thing I do is make Google the default.
It's not MS's job to go drum up a list of favorite search engines for everyone. If they were to be "fair" that list would be quite long. If you have a preference you can choose, if you don't you have a search engine sounds well engineered to me.
First impressions aside now it's time to get down to using the browser on a day to day basis. The first thing that I did was import my Firefox bookmarks.
Wait, I though you already added Google as the default search engine as the "first thing" you did?
Lack of bookmark import support is a good find! But honestly who is going to move from firefox to IE
I was unable to crash the browser through standard day to day usage and performance was reasonable on most websites, although performance on some sites that were heavy on JavaScript (such as AJAX sites like Gmail) was slower than Firefox and Opera.
You talk as if IE 6 crashes all the time, it doesn't
I think some logic consistency checking needs to be implemented in the authors head.
The idea of using the information bar was to stop bombarding users with dialog boxes. However, in their infinite wisdom they decided to put up a dialog box saying 'Did you notice the information bar?'
"Firefox is the only single browser that runs everwhere. " eh? Does it run my phone like Opera?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
we're kind of on the cutting edge with xml/ xsl at the browser. so support is spotty, at best, for everything, in all browsers. even though what we're doing is the way of the future: shove the raw data to the client, let them format and transform
...but if that assertion strikes you as odd, considering the age of xml/ xsl, remember web 2.0 and it's "ajax" is really just iframe tricks from the late 1990s put to novel use by some google programmers recently
as xml and xsl support improves, i'd say that the way you and i are working is the foundations of web 3.0
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
IE7 is to slow to be of use. I'm not on the best computer (not the worst either) but it's slow, takes forever to load a tab and to long to open up. FF is much faster on my machine, which is the biggest usability point. If I want to use a Web 2.0 ap say the ap formally known as writely I want it to open fast so I can take a note or check email quickly and move on with life. I don't want to wait for my computer to load things up. Two clicks to get to my RSS is two clicks to many. RSS didn't make much sense. It didn't pull over new articles for me to read I had to click on the feed. Oh wait they are probably going to start dropping MSFT ads into the feeds they display so the more pages I visit the more ads I see. Speed and simplicity are my bench marks. which makes the score IE 0 FF 2
"I'm making a Low Budget HDV Filipino Horror Movie in NYC "
I suppose you're protesting against all those high budget filipino horror films?
Creo que el cabron esta de broma. I think.
Now let's see. IE can't handle application/xhtml+xml. Its JavaScript implementation doesn't support any of the namespaced DOM functions (createElementNS, getAttributeNS, etc.) making it pretty much useless for any sort of dynamic handling of XML that contains multiple namespaces. Hell, IE7 fails 38% of the W3C's DOM test suite.
Obviously, MoFo has omitted several rather important things from their browser product, one of them happening to be the ability to load external entities. But to say that Opera doesn't support XSLT is just blatantly wrong, and while I certainly don't advocate working around broken browser behaviour, it's certainly something that's done a lot for IE -- I bet you could do it for Firefox's flaw, too, if you spent less time complaining and more time working.
[insert witty comment here]
Well it may be a replay of the WWW standards war but the web is different now, with more separation between content and presentation and (barely) enough browser independent functionality.
Also, a growing number of users will be relying on the web for running web apps, so:
- IE6 is a PITA as a webapp client (try selecting from a longish dropdown menus typing the first letters on the keyboard...)
- IE7 won't be available for web clients with linux embedded, a big market in the near future IMHO
- FF2 spelling checker in the client is a very good idea
- It is possible (and I suspect many web app developers will require their clients) to keep two browsers: FF configured for your web app (java and javascript on, flash off, persistent cookies, remembering passwords and fields, custom toolbar and feeds) and IE for... dunno, getting to microsoft support.
- It is possible many businesses will prefer FF+web apps+openoffice to upgrading all machines for Vista and new Office stuff.
All of these make people discover FF, once they do the idea of a platform bound software like IE becomes irrelevant.
If I were M$ i'd be developing IE7 for embedded and older hardware as fast as i can. For linux, too.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Wow, I don't know if you are just innocently idiotic or plain trolling. You seem to be getting the priority of things wrong buddy.
Repeat after me, "Stable is good".
This reminds me of an article I read a few days ago arguing that crime is good because it keeps police employed.
I tried IE7 out and thought it had some cool features. You know what I did instead of switching over to IE7 from Firefox? I went out and downloaded the Ad-ons Firefox needed. Now I have Firefox AND the "stuff" I thought was cool about IE7.
Sorry IE, Firefox is too customizable! You are able to make it exactly how you want it.
Firefox For Life!
~RabidBunny~
Why is there still a question of Firefox "and" Opera? Opera is already proven to be less buggy and their team more active in developing fixes for the few problems it does have. yet all the zealots keep talking about Firefox? This isn't about what browser is best, it's about this little clique who feels superior to IE users while ignoring the fact that Opera is a better product overall.
The UI is definitely non-standard, and that could scare a lot of XP users. However it's nothing much to be concerned about. My father is a very standard older computer user. Just does the basics and doesn't customize things and doesn't like change. I put IE7 on his system this past weekend and warned him the interface was a bit different. He saw where the address bar was, saw where his Favorites were, and he was good to go, no complaints.
Additionally, the "menu bar" is simply old and out-dated, and not really needed anymore. All of the functionalities within it can easily be found in the new UI in easier to find, less buried locations. Vista and Office 2007 are doing away with it entirely. So it makes sense for MS to have it disabled by default, and for them to put it in an awkward location even when you do enable it.
I just observed Firefox commit a harakiri on my Solaris 10 SunBlade 2000, leaving no clue as to the reason for the crash. Shit like that happens and I can live with it (as long as it doesn't happen too often). I also use Firefox on my Windows XP box and value its striking security edge over the IE6.
Whatever's under the hood of a modern browser, the overall visual appeal and performance is important. Ability to customize it to death has to be one of the key features. With IE7 you have to learn to live with too many choices made by its developers. The interface is static, inflexible and annoys the hell out of me.
I am not a big Windows critic: can't spit on something I productively and by choice use every day. However, IE7 seems to be just half a step in the right direction for Microsoft.
Yes, it does.
I have a slanted view, but I'll share it anyway. I program in VS 2005, I write ClickOnce Applications, my code works in IE6 and IE7. ASPX rendered pages work well in Opera, Netscape and Firefox (I do XML validation tests to make sure it does) It fails horribly in Safari (go mac!) ClickOnce works perfectly in IE6, IE7, and in Opera (with the appropriate setup) and Netscape (with a lot of setup). It fails constantly in FireFox, even with the plugins that are suppose to allow it to function. My advice to all business users who need deployment abilities, use IE6 or 7 it's easy it's fast and you don't have to mess with it. I'm actually waiting to test Firefox 2, I'm hoping that they fixed the ClickOnce Issues and that it's a stable deployment pathway for us, I have a lot of FireFox fan bouys (who by the way are almost, but not quite as bad as Mac users) and would love to make them happy. What I don't like in IE7: Menu bars! Come on! I'm using Vista RC2, and this doens't even make sense in the Vista Interface! Addons! I don't like that the wrong version of addons like Google, AOL, etc Stop it from working! Rendering Issues! They fixed the rendering problems in IE6 and now pages that correct pages because it thinks the browser is IE6 are now broken! Security Overkill on embedded controls, even ones with a genuine digital certificate. (yeah you can turn it down, but it's annoying that it has to be set so high!) What I do like: You can start IE7 in safe mode and have it disable all plugins if someone is dumb enough to load MSN toolbar, Google Toolbar or AOL toolbar (Can you tell I have a problem with tool bars?) Tabbed browsing: gotta have it. Favorites and History popouts. I know it's a gimick, but I like it. Zoom! Especially with my MS keyboard's zoom control (Hey I'm older my eyes get tired when I stare at 1600x1050 all day.) Improved Page Printing (it's minor an most people will never notice it) Multiple Home pages: I can open my browser, and pop, I have my home site, my work site and my favorite Game o' d month site. Anyway, my very slanted two cents worth.
slashdot...better than people watching
before you start swinging your dick around, i said opera doesn't support xsl FORMATTING
and then if you read the sentence RIGHT AFTER the one you quoted, you see it says...
drum roll please...
"opera doesn't support xsl formatting objects"
next time, try not shooting first and asking questions later, jackass
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It sucks, just like all Micro$hit products do.
Next!
Seriously, there's a reason why we all stopped using IE. Was it crashes, bugs, it being too tightly linked to the OS, or just "I hate Microsoft". What ever the reason was most of us didn't leave IE because they wanted more features. You can get tabbed browsing for IE.
That reason we leave is the exact reason why we will never return to IE, even with a great interface. We know track history for the company, and even if IE7 looks like it's bug free, we'll know there's memory leaks, crashes around the corner or what ever. It doesn't even matter if they EXIST, we will believe it has these problems just because we left IE for a reason.
There might be a few people who leave Firefox for IE especially since Firefox loses a little extension support with it's new version but we're not going to suddenly be like forgetting every reason we avoid Microsoft products.
> just check the box and move on, and no we can't scrap the dialog
:)
Its a troll, talking shit as usual.
And by the look of the word 'we', I'm guessing its a Microsoft Developer
Actually - scratch that, not a developer, I'm guessing marketing? He's only complained about what are after all, just opinions. The technical differences and bugs in IE's code are the problems, opinions of the software are a different matter.
Mod this down, PLEASE! This does not deserve +4!
Monkey
Well this is pretty scary. My website usage? Out of 150,000 cgi hits in October... rounded to one sig digit...
126,000 Windows NT
9,000 Mac OS X
2,000 Yahoo! Slurp
3,000 Windows 98 (or Win98)
2,000 Linux
600 Windows CE
400 Mac_PowerPC
200 Windows 95
200 Windows ME
70 Windows CE
40 Blackberry
and approx 162 misc entries.
I had no idea the world was so overwhelmingly Windows! Grrr.
I can do this also for the 7,000,000 monthly "regular" page hits (as opposed to cgi) but I assume I'd get about the same results.
I remember some of the tricks MS did to gain market share, back when, such as beefing up the logs with their bogus 404 requests for favicon.ico... few webmasters weed out these spurious hits when compiling stats.
Mr Winkle.
Only people who don't value software freedom, don't like reading posts in their entirety or in context, and don't hesitate to point out those shortcomings publicly. While I don't agree with the original poster's reaction to the ISP, I do think that software freedom is worth paying for and worth cherishing in its own right.
Digital Citizen
One thing I've always wanted in Firefox - or potentially IE is the ability to split windows - like you can do with Conqueror. I'm kind of curious as to why this hasn't come to other browsers (meaning the primary two browsers).
That's why I switched.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
... and folks are still talking about "Oh, any day now, its going to vanish". Yep, any day now, when Firefox completely reinvents the what makes people choose browsers like Apple reinvented what makes people choose MP3 players ("Price? Commodity hardware my sleek white plastic hiney! I think all you music lovers would sell your kidneys to be hip."). "The same as IE, except more secure" is not a good marketing pitch when after IE becomes *good enough* for most people.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Nearly every app on the mac has it's own interface.... I think MS is merely copying the mac style of no style.
The screenshots make MSIE look bizarre to me, but I am very sceptical that this will really put MS at any sort of disadvantage. To make a joke, here: they're just copying Apple again.
In the last 5 years or so, Apple has gone absolutely apeshit with apps that totally defy their earlier style guidelines. Nobody talks about MacOS's "consistent experience" anymore. What price did Apple end up paying for this? None. Did as many people leave MacOS in protest over the bizarre UIs, as migrated to MacOS after saying "ooh, shiney!!!"? Hell no. Nobody protested at all, except usability nerds, and we all know they have sticks up their butts, anyway. ;-)
Microsoft has probably learned something about human nature over the years. And perhaps one lesson they've learned, is that making bizarre arbitrary changes to UIs, is a good way to make people think something is "new and improved." It worked for Apple, so it will probably work for Microsoft.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm suprised that nobody has commented on the font improvements. Small fonts, especially for font faces such as Arial or Times Roman, looked really bad in IE6 and Firefox. IE7 improves the small fonts and makes them much clearer. Set your brower to smallest font setting in both IE7 and Firefox and click around the net to compare and you will see what I mean.
Oh yeah, let me save you some time, don't look for the font setting under View in IE7, it's under Page:-(
I said, "Put the butter on. Those. Trays!"
-Basil
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
Firefox is okay but it still crashes when I try to view certain types of videos online. Especially in the quicktime and wmv formats.
I'd probably be using another browser if it wasn't for the CustomizeGoogle add-on. Since I'm using Google and gmail you can't believe how happy this makes me.
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
how does IE7 do on the Browser Acid Test?
Surprised on one's mentioned how messed this new Slashdot commenting code is with IE7...
.exe file. That sounds good, and similar to extensions on a per-user basis in other browser, except you have to be an Administrator to install the extension. So unless I want to (and I don't) run as an administrator (or mess with file permissions somewhere within "Program Files"), I can't. Functional, but annoying.
IE7 is far less integrated to the OS like IE6 was. Or at least it seems so. It used to be that you could open web addresses in My Computer and Explorer would "become" IE and navigate to the address. Now, doing the same thing triggers a Firefox window to open and navigate to the address, since Firefox is set to my default browser. Not a bad feature here, but interesting.
Another issue that I personally have, but won't apply to many others, is using a runas shortcut to get to Explorer. I used to have a shortcut that used runas to open IE6 as an administrator. Then I could type "Control Panel" or C:/ and go about my business with an admin window while still logged in as my normal restricted user. Very convenient and I rarely found myself logging on as an administrator to do anything. With IE7, it's merely a browser and you can't (that I've seen) get to the control panel or navigate the file system with it. If you type in C:\ for example, IE7 will open another Explorer window to the C: drive. What's really odd, though, is that this new window opens with the permissions of my restricted user even though the IE7 window was running as an administrator. Usually (or in the past) a window opened would inherit the user permissions of the parent. (FYI, pointing the runas shortcut to Windows Explorer doesn't work, nothing opens.)
Other than those issues, there's really no problems. It's a functional browser and not much else.
What misses the mark, though, is the majority of the add-ons for IE. I got excited once I started reading over the list until I realized most of the were not free. Paying for add-ons? Are you kidding me? Even the ones that are free sound good, but miss the mark when compared to similar add-ons that I'm familiar with.
There's an IESpell add-on that'll spell check text areas for you. Instead of underlining misspelled words like their Office app (and Firefox 2.0) does, you have to click a button to spell check the text areas for you. Functional, but annoying.
There's an InlineSearch add-on that'll find words as you type, ala Firefox or whoever had it first (I don't care who). However, instead of just searching as you type, you have to press Control-F first to open the search dialog along the bottom of the page. Maybe this is better for some people, but if you're going to copy something and make it different, at least give the option to make it behave like whatever you copied. The other problem with this add-on is that is only installs for the user who runs the
There's there's Fiddler which promises to be like LiveHTTPHeaders in Firefox. For the most part it is, but again, it just misses the mark. First, it's just another program and other than capturing HTTP requests that IE makes, I don't see how it's really an add-on for IE. Second, a big feature of LiveHTTPHeaders (and others, I'm sure) is that you can replay HTTP requests after modifying any of the request headers and see the results in the browser. Unless I missed something, Fiddler let's you replay the modified HTTP request, but only shows you the raw HTML response, instead of actually loading it into a browser window. Functional, but annoying.
There are others that are annoying, too, mostly be requiring administrator permissions for some obscure installation folder, but some are good. The NoMoreCookies add-on is useful since IE7's cookie management is non-existent. I did not find any way to delete individual cookies or view their contents. There's a DevToolbar that has some useful features, too.Not that I have a use for them, but there are StumbleUpon and MouseGesture add-ons for IE7, to
Finally someone gets it!
Surely the fact that this article and www.browserden.co.uk appears to have been setup to promote Firefox 2.0 by a member of the Firefox development team (David McGuinness) lends little to its credibility.
IE7 sucks, I will not install it until they make some drastic improvements.
In summary,
1) Can't get rid of the search box in the top right corner.
2) Can't remove Favorites stars
3) Can't remove "Control Panel"
4) Can't restore the menu to its original state
5) Tabs suck, at least you can disable them
6) In short, I want the old, "Classic" UI back, not this big bubbly space-hogging crap
Once/If these issues are fixed I will consider upgrading. Until then I will keep using the best browser ever made, IE6.
First off... Opera's a browser? I thought it was a crasher...that's all it seems to be able to do right for me... Second, how much quality time do you spend with your phone, anyway? Most people find mobiles cost prohibitive to do data service over, much less enough to make choice of browser an issue.
Help us build a better map!
Hehe that made me snort hot coffee through my nostrils.. gaah..
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
Ordinary user don't *really* care about feature inclusions etc. If they did IE6 would have died a death several years ago. What people want is to be able to see and use the websites as intended. Unfortunately support for XHTML and CSS (and other standards) in IE7 is embarassingly poor. I'm convinced this will backfire on MS as users start to realise IE7 breaks half the websites they visit.
[1] Although I failed to note any reason for the 'androgynous' comment unless GP was referring to the GGP posting as AC, but even then, I think GP needs to think about the definition of androgyny...
As a web developer and designer, my biggest worry is that a significant proportion of my target audience (too large to ignore) will be stuck with IE6 for the forseable future, and that will further complicate the development process.
So true. When Microsoft dropped support for IE5 it took several months of complaining until I was allowed to remove it from our supported browser list at work ... I just wish we'd been able to do it much, much sooner.
I bet the IE guys are microsoft read the article and are sulking about how their browser isn't ready to take on the competition. Oh well, I guess they can always take solace in their 88% market share.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
See EnhanceIE.com for some hacks that'll solve some of your issues.
I used to hate tabs when I first started using Firefox, too. I didn't see the point of them. They really grow on you, though. You have have multiple tabs open up for your start pages, middle-click to open links in new tabs, middle-click to close, etc. They really are useful unless you really only go to one or two sites at a time, ever...
---John Holmes...
Uno. Dos. Tres.
Sick of WoW? Try the thinking man's MMORPG: EVE Online
I believe Opera is also the default browser on DS, Wii and PS3 (though you can install Linux and then get FF).
Never had Opera crash much here - up to the vagerities of hardware/software mix I guess.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3