libertus

Last night I received one of my usual junk mails; “Microsoft Download Notifications: August 25, 2006″. Normally I skim then delete but this one caught my eye. Something I’ve been waiting for is now in a state I can download and use - the first “Release Candidate” of Internet Explorer 7.

I’m not fan of Microsoft, having had a long and occasionally arduous relationship with their products. On the other hand, I’m sure the majority of people using the internet do so thorough Microsoft’s magic window, so as a professional web developer I am obliged to investigate and support it as best I can. IE6 was dreadful - it worked but lacked support for some important web standards. IE7, I am told, is standards-compliant, so I am expecting it to work as well as, if not better than, the competing standards-compliant browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Konqueror.

Here are my experiences.

Protocol

I’m a geek, not a normal computer user, so often I have trouble getting a feel for how other people work with their computers. During my review of IE7, I shall be making an attempt to act as if I were a normal user. I shall enable any options that Microsoft recommends I enable.

Download and Install

The initial download yielded a 14MB installer file. During installation, I was recommended to download any updates, which I did. That part of the installation took ages. Overall, the installation process took around 20 minutes and I was asked to reboot my computer to complete the installation. I slept on it.

First Run

My computer booted fine this morning. The installation of IE7 did not seem to have perceptually affected anything.

On first run, IE7 presented me with an options screen. I was recommended to enable the “Automatic Phishing Filter”, which I did. I left my language and settings at “English (United Kingdom)” (from a list of so many possibilities… who’da thunk the world had so many different cultures?). I was recommended to participate in the “Customer Experience Improvement Programme”, which I did.

On saving my settings, IE7 started up proper and the “First Run” website appeared, inviting me to take a tour of the new features. I shall, but first I want to take a look at the new user interface.

First Impressions

Tabbed browsing! Finally! The IE7 user interface looks clean. The address bar shows a back button, a forward button, a down-arrow button entitled “Recent Pages”, the address input (currently containing “http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/tour/fre/default.mspx”), the refresh and stop buttons, an input entitled “Live Search” and lastly a spyglass icon entitled “Search (Alt+Enter to search in a new tab)”.

Underneath the address bar is the tab bar/menu bar, with star icons for favourites, the current tabs, home button, feed button, print button, “page” button, “tools” button and a » button which presumably contains the rest of the menu.

That’s pretty good. Clear, simple and easy to understand. Although the default button placements are different from IE6, a few moments of examination tells me all the usual functions are there. No doubt I can customise the placement and selection of the menu buttons.

At the bottom is the status bar, which is empty apart from the words “Internet” and… Hey!! What’s this!?. A “zoom” level drop-down button set to 100%. I don’t recall being able to zoom with IE6, so I have to try this out…

Before Doing Anything Else, Play With Zoom!

50%! 75%! 200%! Yay! MS have done somthing right. Clicking the zoom button resets back to 100%. Very nice, very handy.

Taking The Quick Tour

Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2000 2001, so Microsoft have been working on this new release for for some years now. The quick tour shall, I hope, enlighten me as to the new features. The tour introductory page tells me that Microsoft are “making the web work for me”. Let’s see.

I click to take the tour, and IE7 reponds by opening a pop-up window. What about tabbed browsing? Why a pop-up? Sigh…

OK, new feature #1 in the clean, sleek new interface. Trouble is, the icons on the tour don’t match the icons in the RC1 interface! Where, for instance, is the “New Tab” button? The tour page says there is one, but the picture of the IE7 interface doesn’t show it. Shoddy.

New feature #2 is tabbed browsing. I’ve been using this for ages, most recently using Firefox but before that I had tabbed browsing in IE6 using “Avant Browser”. What innovation can Microsoft bring to this now rather ordinary feature? There’s a “Quick Tabs” icon which looks like it opens a gallery of page images, to help find a single tab if there are many open. That could be useful, but I tend not to keep that many tabs open at once.

New feature #3 is the search input. I’ve been using one on Firefox for ages, but my main use is just typing Google search terms into the address bar. IE7’s search input “brings your favourite search engines to you”, but what’s the betting that the default search engine is MSN? Evens I think, although the tour doesn’t say so until the next page. You can drop down a list of search engines, in which “MSN Search (default)” is clearly shown.

New feature #4 is RSS feeds. I use a separate application to handle my RSS feed needs rather than a web browser, so I probably won’t use this.

New feature #5 is security. Well, it’s fairly clear that IE6 suffered from a host of security problems. These were the main reason I migrated to Firefox in the first place. Since stopping using IE6 on my Windows computer in 2005, I have had a total of 0 spyware infections and 0 virus infections, despite not running any anti-spyware or anti-virus software. Go figure.

So, what’s new in IE7 security? Badges. Apparently IE7 can tell me if the site I’m looking at is dodgy in some way. I wonder who decides? Evens says Microsoft, but the tour doesn’t say. I recall from the first-run configration screen that the “Anti-phishing Filter” “may send information to Microsoft, which will not be used to personally identify me”.

I find this a little disturbing. Who in their right mind would trust Microsoft to tell them that a website is dodgy, given their security and anti-competitive track record? Certainly not me, but I’m trying to act like a normal user, so I must have faith.

Completing The Tour

OK, now I can begin to “personalise, organise and improve my web experience”. Up to now, I have been writing this post in Firefox. Now I’m switching to IE7 to complete the post.

And No Further

Enough! Internet Explorer 7 SUCKS! Here’s why…

Finishing the tour took me straight to my usual homepage - my blog administration screen.

Zeitgeist in Firefox (the way it is supposed to look)

Zeitgeist in IE7 (how a non-compliant browser looks)

So come on, Microsoft? Where did all that development time and effort go? Certainly not in the rendering engine or support for modern web standards such as CSS2.1.

Worse still, IE7 has completely replaced IE6, so I cannot show you what Zeitgeist looks like there, but I assure you it’s the same^* as IE7.

I’m not wasting any more time on this piece of shit. IE7 is Microsoft’s final betrayal - their complete disdain for web standards is now clear and present. Microsoft do not want you surfing the web our way, they want you surfing their way.

No. “Internet Explorer is not a web browser”.

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