IE7, Not Much Improvement

Well IE7 beta is available for download from TechNet. I played with it earlier today and decided it was a bit shit. They've gone for the overly fluffy user interface they've lately become obsessed with, such as that of Windows Media Player, and so it took me some time to just to find the tools menu so I could adjust my internet settings. I was also alarmed to be asked "do you want to send Microsoft information about every link you click?" Um, no, not really thanks. Once I'd got past the missing menus and the scary privacy issue I instantly viewed my blog in it and was both surprised and not surprised at the same time.

First of all they've removed the CSS bug which I make use of to detect IE and show a "Get Firefox" logo:

Previously Internet explorer seemed to think there was some sort of object in the DOM that came above HTML, and so would actually render the above CSS even though, technically, it is completely invalid and should be ignored. Now however they seem to have addressed the issue, thus making it harder to detect the big bag of shite they call IE...

The disappointment came when I saw that they've changed IE's implementation of the box model ... again. It now renders the menu on the right of the page several pixels too high, although it does finally seem to render the grey title box all the way across as you would expect. So some improvement, but not much.

One new feature they have finally included which IE has been in dire need of for aeons is tabbed browsing, although I didn't like the look of it, but that's probably just because I'm more used to Firefox.

Next I tried to use Fujitsu's corporate Intranet and was told that the version of Netscape I was using was not compatible with this version of the Intranet and that I needed to upgrade to Internet Explorer 4 or newer, at which point I gave up. I dread to think whether the Intranet was reading the client headers wrong or whether Internet Explorer is claiming to be Netscape now ... I just chose to uninstall; which comes with its own set of problems. They hide it in the Add/Remove Programs control panel as a "Windows Update", despite the fact that I downloaded the exe and installed it from scratch myself. That's not an update, that's a fully fledged app in my opinion.

So anyway there you have it. I wasn't impressed and won't be leaving Firefox for IE anywhere in the near future. Incidentally, Firefox 1.5 is out and I've been using that on my work laptop. I can't claim to like the new-look Options dialog, but everything else seems fine with it.