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IE6 and websites start targeting it, those holdout Windows 98 users might decide they're better off with a slightly-outdated Firefox 2 than a massively-outdated IE6.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.
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
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.
Yeah, that's ClearType - a very nice Microsoft innovation that uses subpixels of LCD displays to make smoother text (basically it will address each R, G, and B segment of each LCD pixel rather than just giving the pixel a color value). For some inane reason, it's off by default on XP, and IE7 is the first app to use it by default. If you can take advantage of ClearType that means that a) you're running XP, and b) you've got an LCD monitor. To use ClearType in all applications (including Office and Firefox), right-click the desktop -> Properties -> Appearance -> Effects..., then select ClearType under the "... smooth fonts" item.
Huh???
I can't understand this. IE doesn't even preserve the encoding type on an XSL transform. I can't use it *at all* for my Japanese documents.
And it has unbelievably poor support for CSS. It won't even do tables. Not even in IE 7...
Your comment kind of blows me away...
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?
Yeah, that's ClearType - a very nice Microsoft innovation that uses subpixels of LCD displays to make smoother text
Minor correction, your sentence should say assimilation not innovation .
Microsoft did not invent ClearType.
http://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
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