Guess Who’s Back
Internet Explorer 7 was released on October 18. How the last five years have flown by. So, let’s begin with the good news:
- Numerous rendering bugfixes/improvements. Yay!
- Improved security. (Probably most notably, ActiveX will no longer install stuff from websites without asking. Because I bet we were all surprised at how badly that turned out.)
- New UI.
- Pushed out by automatic update, so we should see a rapid decline in IE6 usage.
Alas, the bad news:
- The rendering improvements were only tweaks, as opposed to the Trident rendering engine being booted out the door, kicked in the guts a few times, then having petrol poured all over it and being set on fire as web developers had hoped.
- They closed some of the worst security holes, but fundamentally it’s still the same IE. And fundamentally it is still the same Microsoft, with a security track record that is, shall we say, unparalleled.
- New UI. Now, okay, this is a subjective thing, so don’t just take my word for it. No menu bar, though? Refresh button hidden inside the Go button? And best of all, it’s not customisable! So you’re stuck with their bizarre design decisions.
- Oh yeah, doesn’t work on Win 2K. Which kindof a lot of people use, so IE6 is going to hang around for ages. Dammit.
Here’s an Internet Explorer 7 Review by CNET. While it’s generally positive, basically every paragraph ends with ” … but Firefox does it better.” Is there any reason to use IE7 apart from ignorance? Well… the toolbars are very shiny.
I feel very sorry for the IE team really. They were on a hiding to nothing. There wasn’t the time to really fix it, so they were tasked with taking what is quite possibly the most widely despised piece of software ever built and somehow patching it up to be as good as browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari, all of which are rocketing along the cutting edge at the moment. It was an impossible task, and they were going to be abused just for trying. You only need to read the comment thread on any of the IEBlog postings to get an idea of it – sometimes dozens, often hundreds of comments, the majority just outright dissing them, their product or Microsoft. It’s not cool.
Mind you, you get that when you peddle the corporate line on your blog. For example, we constantly asked for a way to run IE6 and 7 side-by-side on our PC – you know, so we could support their browser – and constantly got told to either buy another computer or get Virtual PC. Now, again, this was all they could do, so I’m not holding it against them. But what they consistently failed to do was finish it with ” … yes, this is shit, it’s the best we can do right now, we’ll try to do better in the future.” If they had just said that, people wouldn’t need to keep screaming at them about it all the time. The internet is full of angry, nasty people, but you know, if you don’t treat us like shit, we can actually be pretty cool once you get to know us. (By the way, you can get unofficial standalone IE builds.) So it was pleasing to see this, finally, in the latest chat transcript:
Q: Any word on supporting developers who need to run IE6 and 7 concurrently? I’m currently running the IE7 RC1 standalone hack.
Tony Chor [MS]: As we’ve mentioned before, we suggest users who need to run multiple versions of IE use virtualization technology like Microsoft Virtual PC (available for free download now!) or multiple machines. We know this is a pain point for everyone (including us!) and will focus on providing a good solution in a future versions.
From the same chat, this was my favourite bit. Sometimes, you only need one word:
Q: Will IE7 work with Windows 98?
Tony Chor [MS]: Sorry.
So yeah, if you want to get IE7, I guess you can download it from here or something.
