Quickie update on IE 7
Posted on November 15, 2005
2 Comments
A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I had installed Internet Explorer 7 beta on my machine. In general, I found that I rather liked it. In fact, I put it on my work machine as well one day last week in a fit of optimism/madness.
However, I’ve switched back to Firefox. Why? Well, a few reasons.
- IE7 does CSS pretty much the same as IE6 (at least as near as I can tell). Granted, I’m not a CSS expert, more of a hacker, but I had hoped to see some changes here. Maybe those changes will come later in the beta program. Speaking of which…
- … my MSDN subscription expired. Doh. So, if there are any updates to this thing, I won’t get ‘em.
- Tab usage was a bit unpredictable. Sometimes, if a link was to open in a new window, a new tab would be opened (expected). However, other times in that same scenario, the link would indeed go to a tabbed window, but it would use an existing tab (unexpected). I never really did get a handle on what that was all about, but it could be awfully disconcerting. I love tabs and I tend to have lots of tabs open for a reason, darn it. Don’t go re-using my tabs!
- I’ve been spoiled by Tabbrowser Preferences extension for Firefox. IE7 needs something similar.
On the positive side, I really didn’t mind using IE7beta. Granted, I don’t test with a stopwatch, but it seemed pretty snappy for page rendering. The tabs, as implemented, work quite well and are very welcome. The anti-phishing stuff is a nice touch and it is very much more rss aware than IE6. In fact, more so than Firefox in some respects.
Speaking of Firefox, I’ve heard several rumors that 1.5 goes live today. I’ve been watching the site, but nothing yet…
Tags: beta, browsers, IE7, microsoft
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2 Responses to “Quickie update on IE 7”
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I’ve been using 1.5b for a while now, and support for some of my extensions isn’t there yet. Other than that I can’t say as I’ve noticed a real difference. There are some cosmetic differences, and while I’m sure there are some under the hood differences they haven’t made much of an impression on me… perhaps that’s good. It means they’ve been invisible to the user in their improvements and speeding up of things… nothing worse than an upgrade that makes the program you’ve grown used to using and familiar with unrecognizable lol. (And yes, devs do it)
Looks like there may be a 1.5rc3 before the “real” release now: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051115-5578.html