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."

Comments

Re:Opportunity

[eln]

The problem with your theory is that people that are still running 98 or (shudder) ME are probably doing so because it came with their computers and they are not into upgrading anything. The people that do not upgrade their OS, even after 6 or 8 years, are not likely to be the ones jumping on the latest browser upgrade either.

Sure, you can try and get your 98 and ME-using friends to use Firefox, but suggesting that it might be a good idea for the project as a whole to go after a small and shrinking segment of the population, particularly when that segment of the population is defined in part by not liking change, does not seem to be a winning strategy to me.

Before taking on Firefox and Opera?

[King_of_Crunk]

You talk as if IE isnt the most used browser out there...
/me waits for troll comments :P

Re:Before taking on Firefox and Opera?

[aeoo]

No. He's just talking from his own perspective. He sees himself as a battleground upon which Firefox and IE struggle. So far Firefox has won on that particular battleground (a.k.a. the author of the article). So he's talking about what IE has to do to win him over.

It's a completely valid and highly useful way of looking at things. It actually makes more sense to me personally than going by aggregated statistics which lump all things together. Some sites are dominated by Firefox users. Other sites are not. The sites that are dominated by Firefox represent valid and lucrative markets in and of themselves. Of course if you aggregate everything together into one big lump, then in terms of numbers, IE is "winning". But that's not a very meaningful way to look at things. For exactly the same reason GDP is a horrible way to estimate economic health of a nation, and all the sane economists know this.

sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Memory Issues

[zenithcoolest]

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.

Well....

[kclittle]

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.

Drawback

[tasukisempai]

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.

Re:IE7 Text Rendering

[nazh]

Regardless whether or not you like cleartype or not. IE7 should obey the system settings for that setting. I have turned off cleartype in XP, the text is to blurry for my taste, so it was quite annoying that IE7 did come with cleartype turned on by default and ignoring my system wide settings. How to turn off cleartype wasn't very intuitive either. Who would know that that setting is listed below multimedia?

Mod parent way, way down

[Snover]

If you'd bother to read the Opera page you linked to you'd see this:

XSLT, XPath, and XSL-FO

Opera has near-complete support of XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0

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.

Re:Opportunity

[porl]

i can believe it. i have done the same for my sister, my mother, and many other people i know that are "computer illiterate". the fact is, if you spend the effort to show them the ropes for a day or so, computer illiterate people are able to switch to linux a *lot* easier than most self professed 'experts'. the main problem with usability is not that linux (esp ubuntu, mandriva etc) is hard to use, but that it is different to windows. if you have a user that is not locked into the windows mindset then that is not a problem. i can honestly say that i get less calls asking for help now that they are using linux than i did with windows.

IE7 is a functional browser, but not much else

[Sepodati]

Surprised on one's mentioned how messed this new Slashdot commenting code is with IE7...

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 .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.

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

great summary

[briancnorton]

"Microsoft has come a long way but still has some way to go before taking on Firefox and Opera"

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.