IE7 Final is released!

October 18, 2006

If you are a web developer/designer, prepare to get busy! Internet Explorer 7 was released today. Since they have made numerous changes to how they handle CSS, I’m sure that there will be many sites that won’t be rendering as expected.

Of course, if you were a good developer/designer, you would have downloaded IE7 a long time ago and would have fixed any potential issues a long time ago. While I consider myself a good developer, I unfortunately had not even bothered with checking out IE7. I don’t have many sites to maintain and I’ve become quite attached to Firefox. The only real reason I’m interested in IE7 even now is because my day job recently began only allowing IE traffic outbound (don’t get me started) and I miss my tabbed browsing interface. For a while, I just changed the user agent string to IE6 and that worked pretty well for basic sites, but the enhanced Yahoo! Mail and GMail interfaces had issues. So lately I’ve been using IE for checking email. Which then means that I either use the same browser instance to check multiple sites (Yahoo Mail, GMail, Bloglines, MyHomePoint, etc.) or I open a bunch of windows so I can keep them all up. Both options suck compared to just having multiple tabs open in one interface.

Overall, it seems pretty nice, but there are some obstacles to me becoming a true convert. Here is a list of petty annoyances in the first hour of usage:

  • Phishing Filter - While I think that providing that functionality is probably a good service to the general public, it got pretty annoying real quick. I tried to ignore it’s requests to make me decide to either turn it On or Off and told it to bother me Later thinking it would be in a couple days, but it was within a couple of clicks. What was probably most annoying was that it kept throwing the message at me while I was checking out MyHomePoint for any CSS fall-out (it was minimal). For some reason, Yahoo, Gmail, Bloglines, etc. were all immune to the phishing filter. Anyway, I turned it Off since I am pretty confident in my ability to judge a site’s validity.
  • Mouse Gestures - I’ve grown accustomed to my FF Mouse Gestures extension. It makes life much easier to not have to travel so far with the mouse. I know that there are plenty of keyboard shortcuts to do what I want, but I tend to rely mostly on my mouse for my interactions. I would have thought that MS would build that functionality in. I know Ralph Hare provides a Mouse Gesture for Internet Explorer plugin, but the site didn’t inspire me with confidence (no offense).
  • Add-ons - I think it is great that IE7 can support Add-ons which will greatly enhance it’s usefullness, much like Extensions have done for Firefox. I’ve only installed one Add-on so far (Bloglines Browser Plug-in) and it was a really annoying experience. Not sure what the exact order was, but it was annoying in that:
    • The install process was way too long/involved too many clicks. I much prefer the Firefox simple download and go approach.
    • Not only was it too long, but it was trying to install the add-on into it’s own folder under Program Files and I don’t mean nicely contained under some IE7 sub-folder. It was going to create a Bloglines folder under Program Files. The last thing I need is yet another application folder polluting that directory. Why not just stick all add-ons in some common folder (which is what I’m going to do). Granted, I’ve only installed one and maybe that isn’t the default action, but I certainly wasn’t expecting it.
    • During the course of installation, it threw a dialog box at me that told me I had to shut down IE in order to continue the installation. My options were Retry and Cancel. I much prefer the Firefox installation method of “You will need to restart Firefox in order to use this extension.” That leaves it up to me to decide when I want to close all 8 of my tabs and start over. I wasn’t expecting that in the middle of the install.
  • Address Bar to Search Bar Navigation - My current process in opening a new window in Firefox to do a Google search is this: Right-click and mouse up to open a new tab, hit the Tab key to jump to the search box, type my search term and hit Enter. It has become second nature to me. Without mouse gestures, the equivalent is Ctrl + T to open the new tab which should work in FF and IE7. Oops. Someone decided to put the Refresh and Stop icons (of course with a tab stop) in between the Address Bar and Search Box. I’m sure there is a short-cut key to jump straight to the Search Box, but old habits die hard.

I’m sure that I will find many other quirks that I’ll have to get used to but hopefully those will start to be offset by some of the new features. Either way, I’m glad that I’ll finally be able to get back to tabbed browsing at my day job.

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General 

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