Testing IE 7

Internet Explorer 7 is officially out of beta. I must say I like the new features – especially tabbed browsing.

The first browser I really liked was Maxthon, back in the days of IE versus Netscape, since only Maxthon offered tabbed browsing. But Firefox came and took my breath away with its useful functions (Ctrl++ made my life so much easier :)), multitude of extensions AND tabbed browsing. IE 6 never had a chance.

Now IE's bouncing back and I likey. Here's my opinion.

My Favorite Features…

  1. Tabbed Browsing

    Yes, I've mentioned it like, only four times now. (Tabbed browsing! Tabbed browsing! Oh god, sometimes I feel like a child.) I like that you can move the the tabs around in any order you like. I like that each tab has its own close icon (in Firefox sometimes I close the wrong tab because the x icon is at the far right, for all tabs). I like that there's a new tab icon on the tab toolbar, if you're not the type who remembers most keyboard shortcuts and hates incessant clicking for a simple and oft-used procedure (fortunately, I'm a keyboardie). There's also a Quick Tabs icon that shows you all the tabs on one page like slides in MS Powerpoint. And a dropdown tab list. Why would you need those when you can see your tabs right in the toolbar? Unless you open a LOT of tabs. Which I normally don't do since I close a tab when I don't need it anymore. Besides, too many tabs weigh down your browser.

  2. Much More Readable Text

    I don't know what they call this feature, but it resembles how text is rendered in Adobe Reader. It's just much clearer. And I spend a lot of time in front of the PC. Around 5-6 hours at work, straight. Then when I get home, another 5-6 (or more!) hours just surfing or watching movies or editing my blog. And my eyesight really suffers, which is why again, I love the Ctrl++ from Firefox. (Incidentally, Ctrl++ also works in IE. but a slight disadvantage is that the page dances while you do it. Weird.) Whatevs, any program that attempts to help me read is A-OK in my book.

  3. Customizable Search

    LiveSearch is the default search engine. But you can add others like (like anybody uses any other) and and Wikipedia. Obviously, Firefox has introduced a lot of indispensable features.

What I Don't Like…

  1. Tiny important icons

    And they're distributed all over the place too. I had to find where the refresh button was. And the stop button looks more like a close button – which is confusing. It's nice that there's more space for viewing the page but, like I said, my eyesight is kinda poor, so I really don't like having to search around for a tiny icon every 20 seconds.

  2. Not enough options

    One thing I like in Firefox is that I could set it in such a way that whenever another program tries to open a website and I already have Firefox open, the link shows up in a new tab instead of a totally new window. Or I could say that every link I click must be opened in a new tab, even if the link is HTML-set to open in a new window. The reason we want tabs is that we don't want extra windows of the same program, right? But IE doesn't seem to have those options, so a lot of the times I still get my taskbar cluttered with IE windows.

    Sorry! I realized it was just under Tools -> Settings -> Tabs.

Overall…

Well, it's only been an hour of browsing so I haven't really made up my mind. I think IE's really good at copying Firefox. But except for the nicely readable text, I don't see anything that makes it better than Firefox.

So, Firefox's still my default browser. But all that nicely readable text from IE is really trying to lure me away.

Hm. Who says they can't coexist? 🙂

Uh-oh, I Spoke Too Soon!

Using the editor with IE 7 is making my head ache. Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y don't work, ekkk! And what you see, you don't get!

Back to work, IE. Pronto!

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