April 9th, 2006
IE7 Beta
Now I admit I approached IE7 with a biased view on it. I like many others feel that Internet Explorer is a poor browser, and the constant jumping through hoops I need to do to get my sites displaying in IE properly has annoyed me so much that I don’t ever see myself seriously using another IE product for the rest of my days.
After reading this article I am a little paranoid when it comes to Microsoft’s installation set up, I know that some programs and applications like to force you into agreeing with a policy you hate just to see the software work.
As a result I was looking at this more from a web site designer than using it for every day browsing.
Anyway I installed it, rebooted, and opened the program. It crashed right off the bat, I was impressed, and by impressed I mean bemused.
I am most aware that it is beta and there are going to be some issues. I think it crashed pretty much every time I used it, I gave it 3 or 4 tries before uninstalling it on the last try.
First thing I checked when I opened the browser was my websites, I wanted to see if they worked in IE7 (given that my sites, aside from the current DJC build, are all valid XHTML and CSS, I don’t see why it shouldn’t) which they did.
As for the User Interface, I wasn’t impressed. I find that they tend to go for the looks over the usability which is a sign of a bad design in my opinion.
Even in the image above you can see one of the issues I kept having regarding the URL bar.
One item I did like is the apparent ability for new tabs to have a different homepage set up, something I think FireFox could use.
This isn’t a huge in depth look at IE as the consent crashing kind of stopped me from taking a good look, it is more a brief look or an initial thought of the browser.