I want to like it, I really do but I can’t quite get excited about it. Sorry Microsoft but IE7 (beta 2) won’t tempt me away from Firefox anytime soon. In its present incarnation, IE7 is too much of a me-too browser with not enough ‘edge’ to make me go ‘WOW.’ OK – so I’ve recently become a Mac bigot but I still have a Windows XP box (for emergencies 
) OK – it is still a beta and some things will change, other things will improve. You can help by giving it a work out and feeding back to the development team. They do listen and they are working hard to make IE7 the success they aspire to. But in the interests of fairness, here’s my take.
If you’ve never used Firefox then IE7 would be a natural move. At first glance, the interface will confuse because it is very different to IE6 and its predecessors. You’ve got tabbed browsing (about time – much more efficient.) There is a particularly cute pane where you can view the tabs you already have open presented in a matrix. It gives you a quick visual check on what you’re looking at which is useful if, like me, you might have 20+ tabs open. It’s also fair to say that loading pages in IE7 is super fast compared with Firefox. Existing IE users will be very pleased with that as page loading in IE6 even on a decent broadband connection could be on the treacly side.
Native RSS feed management is a shambles. On my machine, I found I had to find the ’subscribe to feed’ button on sites of interest, click it and then hit the ‘add to’ feeds icon. Why can’t I simply drag and drop the feed icon from the address bar (which doesn’t for some reason appear so I can’t drop it anywhere) into Favourites? Fortunately, the Pluck add-in, an RSS feed management thingy, takes away a lot of the pain of managing feeds – or at least it will when it works the way I expect it to. At present, clicking on an item of interest opens a new window – why doesn’t it simply expand the topic?
Microsoft is making a BIG security play. When you run the beta it checks to ensure you’ve got a legal copy of Windows software – fair enough – and runs an ‘anti-malicious’ software routine to ensure you’ve no sniffers or spyware. As an aside, the installation misled me into thinking it would restart the install after an initial reboot. No such luck – that will get ironed out as the beta moves forward. Won’t it?
IE7 includes anti-phishing capability which will be welcome to the unwary. Recent reports suggest US credit card companies and individuals are losing $50 billion each year through credit card fraud – a lot of which occurs as a result of phishing scams. the last figures I saw for the UK were £800 million per annum. I regularly receive a dozen or so phishing emails each week. As a comfort factor Microsoft’s work in this area is welcome but I was left wondering how long it will take the hacking community to find holes in IE7s security model. Past experience suggests – not long.
Bottom line? If you’re an IE user and that’s your business policy, you’ll initially be confused but will end up liking the interface. The on-ramp time could be a day or two, especially if you’re trying to grapple with the ins and outs of RSS. If that’s not an issue for your firm – great. On the other hand, you could always try Firefox and see what you could have. Not that I’m biased
Links
The Beta 2 access site is here
Lockergnome’s comments are here
The IE 7 development blog site is here where you can learn more about the key features and for the technically inclined, engage in esoteric discussions about the security model.
Technorati Tags: innovation, internet explorer 7
