Playing With IE7

Yes, I installed it (but only at work). Mozilla still wins. (This is based off of the default install).

Best feature of Mozilla, the one that I use every day, is to save a group of tabs opened as a single bookmark, and a single click will open that same group of tabs. IE7 allows you to save a group of tabbed websites, but it saves it to a folder. You can't click the single bookmark and have each site open up in its original tab. I find this extremely useful in opening up all of my email websites in one window. Both Hotmail and Gmail open up with no effort.

Tabs in my copy of Mozilla only show up when there are *other* tabs. If there's no other tabs opened, it looks like a standard browser. IE7 always show tabs, so you lose real estate.

Scrolling. I opened up slashdot with my crappy computer in IE7. It's really choppy! Mozilla works much better with my limited hardware.

IE7s default search is Google, which is fine. But, didn't Microsoft create its own search engine? Are they giving in to the popular search engine with the funny name? It's what the people want.

At the bottom of slashdot, there's a huge black space in IE7. Mozilla's version of slashdot is fine. Wonder what that's about.

I know this is a beta, but it's the latest beta, and will closely resemble the final version. I do notice some cool features, though.

IE7 will scan a page for links to RSS feeds. It has a button that becomes enabled at the top that is a quick way to link to those feeds. It then shows a nifty screen with the latest news from that site, complete with filtering by the rss category, and sortable by date, title and author, along with a search. I'm too impatient to see what it does when one of those sites is updated, so I'll assume, for Microsoft's sake, that something awesome happens. Flashy lights and a marching band, for instance.

That seems pretty much it for the UI experience. Mozilla owns IE7 still. There's no developer tools in IE like there is in Mozilla. DOM inspector, color coded source viewer (it still uses notepad), JavaScript debugger, built in Calendar, etc. Microsoft loves to make developers miserable, despite what they say...

This is only biased because Mozilla rules.

blog comments powered by Disqus