ie7 - a firefox user's point of view

[irish]

I'm a firefox user and also use Linux as my OS. So, what am I doing in Microsoft territory? Well, as I have to use XP at work I still like to keep abreast on what is coming up and I can never shy away from new software. IE7 was just asking to be reviewed so after getting my hands on a current build I gave it a go. I'll try to be as unbiased as I can.

Apology - the desktop I'm using has transparency so please forgive the images.

Main screen


IE7 is different in many ways from IE6. It's more clean, modern and has tabbed browsing at last. You may notice that the File, Edit menu along the top is missing. But this menu is not done away with completely and can be accessed through the tools button on the right side. Turn on Classic Menu and you have IE6 functions along the top once again.

Browser Menu bar


The Quick Tabs function is merely eye candy but lovely eye candy at that. All your open tabs are represented as thumbnails which when clicked open that tab on screen.

So far so good, but there is a downside too. I know it's still in beta and a final release is still far off but this screen popped up a few times.

It also seemed to hang on a few occasions and look to be doing nothing before the error popped up.


Verdict.

I think it's much better than ie6 and the tabbed browsing, quick tabs and overall layout are very good and welcoming additions. Over the next couple of months I expect the bugs to be ironed out, new ones to be put in and maybe after all that, ie7 will finally be released to universal updates.

[LxBeast]

Ty for the quickie irish. It's safe to say IE7 > IE6 in terms of functionality, security, and most importantly - looks.

There's only 1 critical piece of the puzzle missing. (Which would tempt me back.) SUPPORT THE F-CKING WEB STANDARDS.

Do that, and I'll seriously consider you as a viable alternative. Until then FF or "other" all the way.

e. I almost forgot, try this extension to replicate the IE7 feature you liked.

[Artie]

There's only 1 critical piece of the puzzle missing. (Which would tempt me back.) SUPPORT THE F-CKING WEB STANDARDS.

There's only 1 critical piece of the puzzle missing for me too, which would tempt me back.... to FireFox that is - WEB DEVELOPERS NEED TO SUPPORT THE F-CKING WEB STANDARDS.

Then web-surfers would dump IE and go on over to FF or Opera... Makes sense, eh?

[TcE]

wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo lets all take advantage of open source programs and clone them wooooooooooooooooooooooooo microsoft rules woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

you make me sick mr bill gates

[Reznorslave]

Yeah, ie7 looks an awful lot like Firefox 1.5!

[LxBeast]

WEB DEVELOPERS NEED TO SUPPORT THE F-CKING WEB STANDARDS.

Ugh, what do you think most web devs do? They stick to standards. Surprise surprise they "hack" for IE, unless they aim to severly limit browser compatability with arbitrary IE only code. (The latter of which occured when IE could be proclaimed the undisputed champ.)

Your argument would've held much more significance (chances are I'd have agreed with it) before the surge in popularity of browsers such as FF/Opera that demand compliance, standards.

So no, the prob is IE, and it's a prob that can and should be fixed. If some users are fustrated with this prospect, I can only assume members of the IE dev team are also. The vicious critique IE recieves is no doubt heard by the team unfortunate enough to work on it. But without Microsofts say so, what can they do?

..And when IE is overtaken by compliant browsers in the long run, we may finally see some sort of movement from the behemoth that is.

Will anyone really care by then? Dunno. My crystal ball is on the blink at the mo', however, if MS want IE to remain the dominant webrowser in an ever expanding market - it must act very soon.

So yeh, the web standard may have been an issue, were we still pre-2004.

All IMO of course.

Then web-surfers would dump IE and go on over to FF or Opera... Makes sense, eh?

It does.

'tis a shame that;

a) Many still don't know of alternative to IE/Won't bother with another browser when the current one they use is "good enough"
b) The majority of companies won't make the effort to install another browser on Windows based machine - there's no incentive when "one that does the job" is built in,
c) It's logical, meaning it'll never come to be. For the mass majority don't care for compliance, someting actively developed on, something.. better.

you make me sick mr bill gates

Funny, I thought he did quite the opposite. Spending millions on vaccinations for those in need IIRC. Oh wait, the whole bash Gate's thing? We still doing that?

Yeah, ie7 looks an awful lot like Firefox 1.5!

FF 0.1 looked alot like IE6.

IE7 is also late to the playing field, hence these *new* features (read: features it was missing)) appear to be MS playing "copycat." It's playing "catch up", quite a different game..

Oh look a the time, 03:15am. Hmm, wonder if I'll be a little less cranky when I wake up.

[lordfoul]

Here is a Firefox extension to view thumbnails of all the open tabs like IE 7.

[Artie]

I don't know why, but browser talk always gets me more fired up than P2P talk.

LxBeast, your arguments are somewhat valid, so I won't counter-argue them. The only reason my first post didn't hold much "significance" was because I've been down this browser road before in other threads. It knocks the wind out of my sails.

The thing of yours I'll comment on though is that it's in my opinion that most web developers don't in fact comply to W3C standards, at least not knowingly anyway. I don't believe they consciously hack JavaScript code specifically for IE. And since IE wasn't the first browser around, I don't see how one can blame it. It just so happens that IE has held the browser market share for a long time, and web devs, being the automatons that they are, go along for the ride, taking the route of least resistence, without being aware that they're coding methods and properties and CSS exclusively inherent within IE. For the large and popular sites, it's more of an exception. Those web devs code scripts and style sheets for all the major browsers. I agree IE should conform more to web standards, but by the same token, if more web devs only programmed code which complied to W3C standards, then IE would be gradually forced to comply. So it's a two-way blame game.

Now that I got that out of the way, hopefully for the last time, I'm just going to go on the attack now, starting with the two idiot open-sourced anti-MS fanboys who posted before you (I'll try to be lenient).

wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo lets all take advantage of open source programs and clone them wooooooooooooooooooooooooo microsoft rules woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

A completely unsubstantiated claim with no merit. If IE's GUI stayed the same, you would complain. If IE's GUI changed (which it did), you would still complain (which you did). In other words, no matter what MS changed differently in IE 7, you wouldn't pass up the opportunity to take a jab at it in a completely dishonest way. Oh, and you obviously wouldn't be "cloning" a certain wrestler like a 14-year-old would do.

woooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Yeah, ie7 looks an awful lot like Firefox 1.5!

Wow, what an angry little face you're making. If anything, IE 7 doesn't look like FireFox 1.5 inasmuch as the toolbar interface looks a little like Netscape 6/7, and the tabs look a bit like Opera's. Heck, IE 7 even has a "Phishing Filter" and put the menu bar on the right side which is at least original, wouldn't you say? But of course, you wouldn't see any of that since your no-substance post suggests you only masturbate over FireFox. Typical of FireFox masturbators, but no surprise really.

[Dormant707]

Here is a Firefox extension to view thumbnails of all the open tabs like IE 7.

Thanks for that LF, installed the extension and I am going try it out for myself.

Thanks to Irish for starting this thread... IE7 looks very interesting.

I have some questions that some people may be able to answer me:

Will IE7 be available as a stand alone app?
Will it be totally customisable as FF is?
Will non-M$ people be able to create extensions, plug-ins and themes for IE7?
How resource hungry is IE7 going to be?

I have something that is a very rare commodity today - loyalty. I am loyal to friends and family, companies that do a decent job in giving me service, good prices and so on. I like to buy good quality products that don't let me down, thus my absolute love for VW cars. (My brother has a '78 bug that has never let us down). I am not a fanboy, but I love FF - simply based on a number of reasons, the biggest being the simplicity on FF, customisable exts, plg-ins, themes and rock solid stability. I also like the cost - nothing!

[thejynxed]

No, once you install IE7, it is part of the OS just like IE6 (beta-builds are another story, the OS functionality tie-ins are not as yet present, but will be in the finalized project, which is why you will get random errors, crashing, etc when using it, it tries to access certain processing threads, etc that it isn't officially tied into yet, and bam, down it goes). Microsoft Vista will of course come with IE7 pre-installed. Totally customizable? No, of course not, this is Microsoft remember. Will non-MS people be able to create added stuff for IE7? Only if they hack it, or pay MS the licensing fees. Resource hungry is an understatement when it comes to this browser. Vista will require you to have 1 GB of RAM to even get a modicum of functionality out of it. If you want to turn on bells and whistles, you better be prepared to have alot more, especially when it comes to IE, an application that hides its resource usage because it is tied directly into the OS. Not to mention IE7 is full of unneeded crap like transparent windows, glass effects, etc.

A good rule of thumb for IE resource use: if it says X number of MB RAM being used, add about 100 MB of RAM to that number to get the real amount. It's not as noticable on machines with a large amount of RAM (1 GB or more), but if you only have 256 or 512 MB of RAM, open up IE, open a few pages, then in Task Manager, take a good look at your running processes to see your running processes mysteriously lose (read: forced to give up by the OS) RAM allotments (I've watched processes go from 20,000 KB of RAM allotment down to 4,800 KB when IE was run) while IE doesn't seem to increase much (and doesn't lose anything at all) on the surface. Your Page File use will also jump an unseemly amount when IE is open and running.

[LANjackal]

I like the stability of IE and the extensibility of Firefox. FF will continue to be my primary browser for most purposes, but IE's lack of a tendency to crash or suddenly spike in CPU use is attractive in some situations.

For example, while FF does almost all of my browsing, IE handles my Myspace and large file uploads to remote servers, which crash my FF.

[Dormant707]

No, once you install IE7, it is part of the OS just like IE6 (beta-builds are another story, the OS functionality tie-ins are not as yet present, but will be in the finalized project, which is why you will get random errors, crashing, etc when using it, it tries to access certain processing threads, etc that it isn't officially tied into yet, and bam, down it goes). Microsoft Vista will of course come with IE7 pre-installed. Totally customizable? No, of course not, this is Microsoft remember. Will non-MS people be able to create added stuff for IE7? Only if they hack it, or pay MS the licensing fees. Resource hungry is an understatement when it comes to this browser. Vista will require you to have 1 GB of RAM to even get a modicum of functionality out of it. If you want to turn on bells and whistles, you better be prepared to have alot more, especially when it comes to IE, an application that hides its resource usage because it is tied directly into the OS. Not to mention IE7 is full of unneeded crap like transparent windows, glass effects, etc.

A good rule of thumb for IE resource use: if it says X number of MB RAM being used, add about 100 MB of RAM to that number to get the real amount. It's not as noticable on machines with a large amount of RAM (1 GB or more), but if you only have 256 or 512 MB of RAM, open up IE, open a few pages, then in Task Manager, take a good look at your running processes to see your running processes mysteriously lose (read: forced to give up by the OS) RAM allotments (I've watched processes go from 20,000 KB of RAM allotment down to 4,800 KB when IE was run) while IE doesn't seem to increase much (and doesn't lose anything at all) on the surface. Your Page File use will also jump an unseemly amount when IE is open and running.

Thanks for the answer Jynxed...

My questions that I raised are what most people will ask about IE7. FF is such an amazingly customisable browser and that is one of the biggest attractions to it. If you like to change the look and how FF will behave, then FF is for you!

My concern with regards to Vista is from a DRM point of view... I may be going to dual boot options with Win XP Pro and Linux instead of upgrading to Vista.

[LaX]

I with jynxed with this. I dont use IE6 mainly coz its tied to the OS core, thus putting my system in danger. It also supports ActiveX and imo kinda ugly. I know FireFox also looks kinda ugly but hey! Themes! Then I found something even better...Extensions! I also found out you can customize all the tool bars and buttons and stuff.

When IE7 comes out, I'll still continue to use FireFox. Thought IE improved a lot, it still isnt open for people to make themes and extensions. I probably wouldnt use Vista either, as I only have 512mb ram. I am dual booting XP and Linux right now, and its probably gonna stay this way.

[thejynxed]

The DRM is a concern yes, but, from what I saw of the CES demo of Vista, I would be even tempted to dual-boot Vista and XP Pro :) There is finally stuff in the upcoming Vista that I've wanted for years (grouping files according to author, date, etc), thumbnail views of file contents, cataloging of media files according to file type, media type, content (you can group Jazz music together, etc, etc) and not have to go digging around looking for it, or dumping it into special folders, no manual shortcut creation, etc, the OS can catalog it and you can access it instantly.

From what I've read recently about Vista's DRM scheme, it will only apply to content that is flagged as being DRM'd. If you have unprotected content, the DRM won't even be an issue. Alot of the old information about Vista's DRM is almost a year old, and was kind of overshooting things a bit. Will the DRM be more robust? Sure. Will it interfere with you using your content? Only if it's DRM protected to begin with.

First we'll have to wait and see how quickly it gets cracked and how many exploits show up within the first week of release before I install it though :)

[irish]

The beta version of ie7 that I installed has replaced the original ie6, so I guess that it has become 'part of the system'.
I can't imagine Microsoft releasing a stand alone version of ie7 as it would lead to too many better versions which is a pity. IE7 looks good and works well, but as thejynxed has pointed out, the final version when included with Vista will have transparent whatnots for asthetic purposes which will add nothing but extra wasted resources.

[Dormant707]

The DRM is a concern yes, but, from what I saw of the CES demo of Vista, I would be even tempted to dual-boot Vista and XP Pro There is finally stuff in the upcoming Vista that I've wanted for years (grouping files according to author, date, etc), thumbnail views of file contents, cataloging of media files according to file type, media type, content (you can group Jazz music together, etc, etc) and not have to go digging around looking for it, or dumping it into special folders, no manual shortcut creation, etc, the OS can catalog it and you can access it instantly.

From what I've read recently about Vista's DRM scheme, it will only apply to content that is flagged as being DRM'd. If you have unprotected content, the DRM won't even be an issue. Alot of the old information about Vista's DRM is almost a year old, and was kind of overshooting things a bit. Will the DRM be more robust? Sure. Will it interfere with you using your content? Only if it's DRM protected to begin with.

First we'll have to wait and see how quickly it gets cracked and how many exploits show up within the first week of release before I install it though

That is my attitude... wait and see. I don't want Vista if it is full of shit. As for DRM, I agree with what you are saying, but I am concerned that Vista is the first step in a long line of more agressive DRM.

[LaX]

Agreed. Their next step is probably forcing companies like Dell to have drm chips embedded in every piece of hardware they sell

Customized PCs are the way to go for me.

[poullos]

It's difficult to drop firefox with all its plugins. IE7 looks nice but the pluggins for firefox are a +++

[Dormant707]

Everytime I introduce someone to FF, they make a permanent change - no going back to IE. That is what M$ is not going to succeed in doing. Of course the masses of sheep will be using IE7, and the rest will be going with alternatives...

[HouseCrowd]

Wow! Nice work Irish!!



I would make this sticky, but we have so many stickys in here already!








ah, sod it! ..... *sticky*

[LaX]

Wow, 9 stickies already.

Was too busy debating about IE and FireFox, I actually forgot to praise irish! Great job irish, cleared up quite a few things. I'm kinda amazed you would try out IE7 for us, especially when you are used to linux!

[irish]

I just saw this, ie7 beta2 preview was released to the public on Tuesday for general testing.
You can download your perfectly legit copy from here
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx

If you don't want to download and install ie7 beta2 then you can also try out the tour version which is here
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/tour/default.mspx

Have fun

edit - be sure to read this however as there are bugs in ie7

[Nuttyguy]

however, microsoft wont release it* for x64 systems

EDIT: *the beta

[Artie]

Of all the thousands of programs out there, Internet Explorer is probably the most highly targeted by hackers, so it's no surprise that there are bugs and exploits out there already, especially since it's still in beta.

Like 'em or hate 'em, MS has their work cut out for them.

[ultracross]

eewwww, it looks so.... ugly! MSIE v7? hmmm, i thought they discontinued that 'product' ... well atleast i havent seen it for ages. when i do see it on a lamers computer (aka newbie that dont care), i think im looking into the deep past when the Bliss theme became dull, bland and boring.. when users never got up enough strength to change their frikkon wallpaper, router password or correctly setup a mail client!!!!

IT HAS GONE TOO FAR FOR TOO LONG THAT IE IS THE INTERNET!!!

oh, and i also have to say.. i hate defaults.