Slashdot Mirror
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IE6 and websites start targeting it, those holdout Windows 98 users might decide they're better off with a slightly-outdated Firefox 2 than a massively-outdated IE6.
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
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
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.
[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
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.
I mean:
and:
Ignore this signature. By order.
"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)
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
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Thanks, Dynedain. I wasn't aware of that ad. Here's a link to the one I was refering to:
;-)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kengz/198041571/
In the ad they use the term personal computer which at that time was abbreviated as PC. This was before Compaq made the first IBM clone. It was run in August of 1981.
*** mumbles about absent minded oldies....
Here's the text if you're running a non-gui computer
Welcome, IBM. Seriously. Welcome to the most exciting and important marketplace since the computer revolution began 35 years ago. And congratulations on your first personal computer. Putting real computer power in the hands of the individual is already improving the way people work, think, learn, communicate, and spend their leisure hours. Computer literacy is fast becoming as fundamental a skill as reading or writing. When we invented the first personal computer system, we estimated that over 140,000,000 people worldwide could justify the purchase of one, if only they understood its benefits. Next year alone, we project that well over 1,000,000 will come to that understanding. Over the next decade, the growth of the personal computer will continue in logarithmic leaps. We look forward to responsible competition in the massive effort to distribute this American technology to the world. And we appreciate the magnitude of your commitment. Because what we are doing is increasing social capital by enhancing individual productivity. Welcome to the task. Apple.