I have been using Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 for the last few days just to check out whether the web application we’ve developed still work on Redmond’s latest offering. Here’s my impressions. Feel free to comment.
- Interface looks sleek. Nice shades. No more menu bar (unless you want to be called a classic).
- Now you can manage IE Add-ons just like how you can manage extensions in Firefox. Except most 3rd party add-ons are commercial with a price tag.
- Rendering, as far as I can tell, is very close to IE6. Actually, the better way to say it is, when you look at the rendered result, you can tell that it is Internet Explorer. It might have better CSS support, but I still found exactly the same glitch when rendering certain pages.
- Tabs, oh tabs! Middle-click to open a link, Ctrl-W to close the tab — just like the others. Now all the modern browsers have tabs. Welcome to the team, IE.
- RSS/Atom feed support. Nice feed rendering, but it seems to ignore any stylehseet declared in the feed, i.e. FeedBurner’s feeds still show up in IE’s own style. IE7 also lets you subscribe to feeds — just like all the other modern browsers.
- Toolbar search box. Surprisingly default to Google (hmmm, just like all other browsers). It uses OpenSearch format to define providers, which is nice.
- Extra security features, i.e. phishing detection. Good stuff. Not much use to me, but I am sure it would save grief of many when it is released.
- Favourite/bookmark management still sucks. They probably intended to keep them hard to use so users will stick to the preset list of links
- Memory leaks like crazy. I think the days is numbered where Firefox 1.5 as the memory leak leader. I have to literally close down the browser every hour to keep memory usage sane. I guess that what “beta” is for.
Fortunately due to limited rendering change our web application still works flawlessly on IE7. Now, how do I revert mine back to IE6?
Update: Just killed IE7 again. Closing multiple tags with Developer Toolbar running — hangs. Oh well.
I think the interface is absolutely awful – a total dog’s breakfast! And I can’t believe the parent div of an absolutely positioned div still needs to HaveLayout, but hopefully that’s fixed before final (though I’m not holding my breath). Yay tabs.
Actually, the comments here (ie7 hacks) reminded me IE7 is ‘layout complete’, so probably no more fixes :|
From the progress and rendering changes they have done so far, I don’t think IE7 final will be too much different. Neither do I think being more compliant is of Microsoft’s interest, despite all the marketing they have done with their IE devel blog.
I actually don’t really care about the “new interface”. A glimpse of Vista maybe.
And thanks for the link! I changed a site’s CSS late last night, tested on IE7 and it looks fine (after more hacks of course). Woke up this morning and checked the site with IE6. Doh! A big mess. Now web developers just have one more incompatible browser to support.
I’ve since uninstalled IE7 and will probably not install again until it is more wild spread.
The interface is trying to be cutting edge, yet it actually makes the program harder to use by HIDING menus. WHY? If they can’t think of a better interface, they shouldn’t hide the old one.
Terrible. If this is a sign of Vista, then Vista can suck my balls.