IE7 Beta 3 First Impressions

Posted on July 1, 2006 One Comment

ie7 Logo On Thursday I downloaded and upgraded to the new Internet Explorer Beta 7. I also decided to use it as my primary browser on the home machine to get a better feel for how it works and gather my thoughts. That’s made life interesting: My work machine is Firefox 1.5, my home workstation is now IE 7 beta3 and my home linux laptop is Opera 9. They definitely all have their pros and cons (future topic I suppose) but for today, here are some thoughts on ie7 thus far.

Memory usage seems respectable. With 6 tabs open right now, I’m reporting 65MB in use. Minimizing the browser temporarily frees up or “resets” memory as well. In fact, just now I minimized and went from 65 to 32MB reported. Can’t complain.

Performance feels great so far. I won’t say that this renders faster than Opera for a couple reasons though. First, I don’t have a stopwatch. Second, I have no other convenient way to quantify such a bold statement. But it sure feels faster than Firefox now and rather comparable to Opera.

Tab management has come a long ways since the earlier betas. I’m still tweaking, but I think I’m much happier with how things work now. And being able to drag/drop/reorder tabs (finally) is priceless to me. Under Internet Options -> General tab, there’s a button to manage tab settings. The one that I’m wrestling with the most is “Open new tabs next to current tabs.” I can’t decide if I like that or not. I had become accustomed to how Opera managed opening and closing tabs and I’m still trying to adjust to IE’s method (more like FF). Time will tell I guess. What is quite nice here is that I can basically make this act just like my FF install acts — without installing the tabbrowser extension.

I’m wrestling a bit with the Developer toolbar beta though (not part of ie7 beta 3). It can be compared to the Firefox Web Developer extension. It installs and runs with the latest IE beta, but the menu gets messed up easily. As I navigate within a tab, or switch from tab to tab, the menu for the Dev ToolBar will jump around. Sometimes. Or grow double tall and lose the menu items. A bit wonky. I’ve taken to leaving the toolbar off except for when I need it. The “View DOM / Find -> Select Element by Click” option is priceless, as are some of the other features, so it is definitely worth having around in spite of the odd behavior from time to time.

User experience is generally positive. Most sites render as I’m used to from other browsers. Even that pile of junk Kraft promotions site! The script processor is by far the most finicky of any browser. It absolutely hates something at the WordPress support site, that’s for sure. I had to do some fussing with advanced options to get it to at least stop raising error dialogs. Now it just shows the error in the bottom left corner which is much more tolerable. The screenshot there has my current settings for that hilited in the orange box.

I tried using the WordPress wysiwyg editor with this beta (I tend to have it disabled as it annoys the snot out of me!). In general, it worked well, but the image options “Send to Editor” don’t appear to work in that mode. Works fine with that turned off though. No big loss there… I think the only browser that works reasonably well with the wysiwyg is Firefox, but again, since I don’t use that editor. meh. Moving on…

Overall look and feel is, to me, pleasing and sleek. It took a bit of getting used to, but I like the buttons, tabs and menu layouts. The little stars for favorites management is easy to get used to as well. I tend to run with most of the toolbars off and just turn on the Dev ToolBar when I need it (as mentioned above). There’s no “clutter” factor to having this one up and running. Here’s a shot of how I tend to have it setup:

Overall? I actually find myself enjoying it. I’m not enough of a web standards wonk to know if I’m missing out on anything by using it, but so far it has handled everything I’ve tossed at it. I think I’ll keep running with it on my home workstation for a bit longer.

[Update] I didn’t even mention the RSS reader stuff, did I? It’s not too bad. More on that in a future post.