I installed Microsoft IE7 Beta 2 preview on my machine yesterday. So far I like what I see and although I don’t really think it will get back the people who have already deserted to other browsers like Firefox, I think it may stop others leaving the ship. Personally I’ve never been a fan of FF as it doesn’t offer me anything that I want; I have no need for RSS in the browser or TABS, and generally I found it much slower than IE.
Anyway, after a day or more using IE7 there are a few things I noticed;
after trying to use the TAB functionality I have ditched it. I really don’t want TABBED browsing, I don’t see what all the fuss was about. In my opinion Microsoft made the correct decision when it started dropping the MDI from it’s software.
Having set up the RSS feeds, I really don’t want to read my feeds in a browser, it just don’t feel right, and there is no notification when new feeds update, so I will go back to my seperate Feed Reader Application. It is good that the browser detects the feeds and allows easy subscription, and I just hope that either in XP or under Vista other feed readers will use the underlying RSS model so that I can subscribe while in IE but read in another app. Alternatively Microsoft, please add RSS Feeds to outlook, and while you’re at it, add newsgroups as well!
Other than that I like the look and feel, and the lightweight interface and some of the other little changes… so it’s a goer for me!
What’s the CSS2 and PNG transparency support like? Have they managed to improve these too?
My only fripe with FF is the memory usage bug which is STILL not fixed (grrrr!). And I could not live without tabs!
Well the PNG stuff is fixed… I will send you some code to disable the IE PNG fix from M/MU for IE7.
As for other things… it will be hard to tell as many sites are already working around problems for IE.
And lo! The Firefox developers did release an update to FF to fix the memory leak this very day. How’s that for listening?! 🙂
I do hope the CSS support is better, but with all the branched CSS3 levels, I am not holding my breath.
And dropping MDI, yes, suits me fine. But it’s what (some of) the kids want 😉
Although tabs are a kind of MDI, I don’t think the UI model in (for example) FF is quite the same as the traditional Windows one.
With an Office application there is never a link between the documents, and I personally rarely have a need to compare a set of spreadsheets or a set of Word documents. But when browsing I often want to look at a set of pages which are related, most commonly because they’re all linked from the same start page (e.g. icemark links page, or a Google results set). So I start with a page and click-click-click, I’ve got a set of pages to read for the next 10 minutes, rather than having to go backward and forwards lots. I think it works great.
Note that I do agree that in general getting rid of the MDI interface was a good move.
Roberto/.
PS: please keep plugging away at your LoM remake. I’m sure it will be great if you finish it!