Archive for February, 2006

Well, I’ve now been using IE7′s Beta 2 for about 8 hours. Keep in mind that while I often use FireFox these days (while travelling, specifically), IE is my main browser by far. And, as a result, this short review will be from an IE user’s viewpoint.

The following are areas I want to touch on:

Interface

What can I say, it’s nice and clean. As an IE6 user, I always preferred as few toolbars and clutter as possible. IE7 allows me to do this in a lot of neat little ways. All my old shortcuts still work (including Alt+D, Tab bringing me to the Google search box), the new tabs interface is as simple and featureful as I’ll ever need it to be. I don’t anticipate using tabs much, but IE makes it much more seamless to the experience to a new tabs user than FireFox did. In FireFox you had to choose to open a tab. IE is fairly good about managing them more effectively.

In addition, the screen area is really highly protected. There is more space than any other browser I’ve used. I like the rearranging of the nav buttons, personally. I like the new Home button (which allows you to change your homepage without going to Tools > Options. I like the new zooming feature. I like ClearType finally being on by “default” (it’s not actually on by default… it’s only on by default if you haven’t before turned it off… Basically it’s using the key that Windows had always had, so if you’ve never tuned ClearType, you’ll want to).

Overall, very happy. I’m NOT happy that the Options menu is just as complex, if not more so, than ever. But, the main interface is very nice.

Again, I’m not comparing to FireFox. Merely to IE6.

Standards Updates

Lots of great updates here. More than 500 CSS, PNG, etc, bugs were fixed in this build. There are still some, but in fact the biggest reason this beta release exists is to get feedback from developers on what rendering issues still exist. The team isn’t promising to fix all of them out of the box, but they’ve certainly fixed the top 10-15 issues the vast majority of standards advocates had, which is a good start. It’s not good enough, but it’s a good start.

Features

Gotta say, Phishing feature is much improved. Popup blocking is much improved. Malicious software detection is much improved. Tab previewing is very nice. Favorites system is new, and will take some getting used to, but seems very, very good. Print preview is kickass (as are many of the print innovations).

Overall

Okay, overall? This puts IE roughly on par with other modern browsers. As I said, it’s a good start. What it does right is that it is a huge upgrade visually, security wise, rendering engine wise, UI wise for existing IE users. It probably isn’t enough to entice any FireFox users back, and for good reason. Microsoft broke a lot of trust, and made a lot of mistakes, over the last 5 years.

However, this is a good start. My impression is that we should see major versions of IE every 18 months or so. While that might seem like a long time, it also means we’ll be seeing beta and community drops every 6 months or so. In my mind, the browser market has largely plateau’d. We can see this in many of the “slim” browsers adding gobs and gobs of features, because the simple stuff has been tackled.

My hope is that over the next 3-4 years we see more innovation, more portability of browsers, more implementation of the advanced W3C standards, more focus on mobile phones and portable computing and a greater focus on accessibility.

Why, for example, shouldn’t IE come with a screen reader and voice recognition as add-on modules? Why doesn’t it include pen interface elements?

Still lots of work to do here, but this is a good start. It shows that the team has been working hard for the last year, and that when Vista comes out later this year, the browser upgrade will be noticeable, even though it won’t be enough to transform the industry or anything.