MikePadgett.com

IE7: worth the wait?

— It's been years since Microsoft released a new version of Internet Explorer. So should I get excited now?…”

I’ve been roadtesting the beta 1 of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7, which was released to a limited audience (though I gatecrashed myself a copy). How’s it been? Well, I started this item already but it crashed, so that’s a bad start!

Fans of Redmond’s finest (not counting Milt’s Barbecue, of course) have been made to wait about four years for this seventh iteration in the perennial series of the world’s most popular standards shirker.

Was it worth that wait? Well, after a few days’ general use and comparison with Firefox, Opera and even Netscape 8 (leaving no stone unturned, then), and allowing for more crashes and unexplained slowdowns than the A34 between Oxford and Milton Park, I’m forced to say no.

The GUI is a tragic attempt to marry up the playtime iconography of XP and the muted future demands of Longhorn (now with the [un]inspired title of Windows Vista). Ignoring fifteen years of precedent, the File Edit View etc menu appears at the bottom of the header bar, having been pushed out of the running by Back/Forward, the Address bar and an inexplicably miniscule Refresh button.

Tabbed browsing is nothing new. Users, say MS, have been crying out for it, so now the tabs come thick and fast, starting out with none-too-neat land of the giants widths until the interface gets suitably crammed with them. There’s also a somewhat counter-intuitive blank tab for tabbing the current page.

On the plus side, integrated search support is good, with a little window to switch between all the good engines and MSN, thereby saying goodbye to that annoying popup frame on the left. There’s also a kind of RSS reader, though it’s not really comprehensive enough at this stage to warrant further comment.

Devwise, the IE box model issue doesn’t appear to have been corrected, though I haven’t delved too far into this yet, but MS are shouting out loud about the [shock] PNG transparency support that has now finally arrived with IE7.

Overall, then, rather disappointing and in that sense, predictable. I’ll look forward to beta 2 and hope for a miracle.