IE7 beta redux
I got my hands on the Internet Explorer 7 Beta. Here some first impressions.
First I would like to complain for a bit. This isn't a "public" beta release. Microsoft only made it available to people with a MSDN subscription. So I thought, okay I have one, let's have at it. But no. Of course, I couldn't download it with my subscription. The communicative powers of Microsoft failed to mention what level of subscription you needed.
Thanks to the fact that people on the internet are, unlike Microsoft, very communicative, I got my hands on a copy the very next day.
The 10mb download took its time to install. After rebooting the computer, I had a go at testing.
What immediately catches the eye is the lay-out. It doesn't hold up to Microsoft conventions. The tabs are above the standard menu, which makes it difficult to locate. The tabs feature seems to be directly copied from Mozilla Firefox. Scrollwheel click on a link opens the link in a new tab, control-T opens a new tab, etcetera. After opening a tab, the rendering screws up for some reason.
I was delighted to discover all my IE CSS hacks still work. This also means that there have been no changes to the rendering engine. No surprise there, but good to know we won't be stranded in CSS limbo just yet.
Microsoft also lifted the idea of integrated search box from its competitors. A positive point about that: It defaults to Msn search, but four other search engines are pre-defined, including Yahoo and Google. I couldn't find ways to add search engines quickly though.
One final gripe is the complete lack of Atom support. The feedreader solely supports RSS, which I think is a big mistake.
Let's hope this Beta is only the first step, and the actual finished product will fix most of the UI and support problems, or they might as well not have bothered building this thing.
– Hayo
Discussion
Faruk Ateş said: on 28 Jul 2005 18:45:06
As I explain in my own response on it, I think it's best to just be patient right now and see where beta 2 and 3 will take us, as a more proper indication:
http://kurafire.net/log/archive/2005/07/28/ie7-beta-1-release
Hayo Bethlehem said: on 28 Jul 2005 18:48:15 To be fair, I didn't really have high expectations of a first Beta release. I don't think the other beta's will add much flavour to the cake though.
David Naylor said: on 28 Jul 2005 18:58:50 Yeah, I agree. All we can do now is wait, hope and pray.
Mark Wubben said: on 28 Jul 2005 19:39:41
> The tabs feature seems to be directly copied from Mozilla Firefox.
You make it sound like that's a bad thing ;-)
James said: on 29 Jul 2005 03:03:59 You're all being very optimistic, which is nice given what I've seen on other blogs today... however, given what is in beta 1, there isn't an awful lot to get excited about is there. That said, let's see what beta 2 gives us - hopefully it's a lot more.
t said: on 29 Jul 2005 07:08:32 i agree with some of the other punters here - that we should wait for the next betas before we make too harsh a judgement. but having said that, this is a multimillion dollar company, and beta or not, you'd think it'd turn out a bit better than this slap dash whack job.
Weyert de Boer said: on 29 Jul 2005 11:13:00 Yes, it's a merely a useless beta. I have been better beta 1 releases by a other company, I was shocked at that beta. I only found 9 bugs in that beta, you can't call that a beta anymore :)
Crivens said: on 10 Aug 2005 21:06:29
Hmm. Don't like the layout much. Totally agree with the tabs being in the wrong place too. Horrible. No way of manually moving them around?
Maybe my brain is just trying to make it seem better than it is, but basically it seems quicker than before. Could be just be though.
My main gripes are with the tabs though. I mean I would prefer to have a kill button on each tab like Firefox. No deal breaker though. But my main reason for still sticking to Firefox for *some* things is the fact that you can open an entire favourites folder into tabs. ie. right click on a folder and click on "open in tabs". All items in the folder then open into individual tabs. Fantastic for daily checking of multiple sites. Do that and Firefox is dust for me, as it never seemed to work 100% on my machines for ASP work.
Cheers
oscommerce templates said: on 11 Sep 2005 17:05:26 Firefox rules :)