Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview
Written by: Doug Jenkinson
Article
Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview (7.0.5296.0) was recently released. I decided to download it, check it out. I am not impressed at all.
I suppose its nice to see Microsoft take the public sentiment to heart and upgrade their browser. Their own trend towards Web 2.0 will require a decent browser for the full effect. I'm sure the push for an update lies within the leaps and bounds we are seeing from Firefox and Opera (especially Opera on mobile platforms).
First Impression - My first impression was of the installer. I should say, of the installer completely replacing my install of IE6. I wasn't too happy about that. And it seemed to take a really long time, on a decent machine at that.
Layout - The layout isn't too bad... for having parts ripped from Firefox/Opera. The appearance of the Forward/Back reminds me of Flock. There's a search bar as well in the same place as Firefox. The menus/toolbars at the top of the screen appear to be shorter leaving more room for a webpage.
Phishing Filter - Before I can get too involved in browser, IE7 wants to active its phishing filter. I'm not interested, so I decline. And asked again on every other webpage I load. Then I got fed up and restarted the browser. I wasn't asked again. The filter appears to work by sending the URL of a page to a service that checks it against a known blacklist. Novel idea, I wonder if that blacklist will stay up to date or keep up on current scams? But I'm rather worried that the whole URL is sent. URL's can contain sensative form information or session data. And I'm not a big fan of vendor-lockin. I wonder if the filter can be switched to use another service?
Tabbed Browsing - Ah, the staple of a modern browser. Nice to finally see this in IE. Each tab has its close button. Two things I really do like relate to tabs. When the tabs "overflow", the left- and right-most act as scroll buttons. Also, there is a drop-down list of all the open tabs. Tabs are available, but they don't seem to be very well integrated. For example, there's no "Open In Tabs" in the favorites menu; built-in functions do not open in new tabs nor can I find an option toggling this.
Quick Tabs - Even niftier than tabs is the Quick Tabs view. It's a little, tiled thumbnail view of each tab all in one place. Each thumbnail can be clicked to go to that tab. I've been using something similar in Firefox (Tab Sidebar) that works rather well.
Zoom - IE7 also has a built-in zoom feature, anywhere from 10% to 1000% in fact. It uses a bi-cubic interpolation algorithm to resize enlarged images, which makes them come out rather well. It's a nice touch that hasn't been taken far enough. The user still needs to use the scrollbars to move around the page. It would be nicer if the page autoscrolled (say one "screen" at a time) when the cursor is moved to that edge.
Search - IE7 is sporting a search box in the same location as Firefox/Opera. It defaults to MSN, but supports the OpenSearch 1.1 specification allowing all sorts of search engines to be added. MS even has a page available allowing a user to install new engines.
RSS - IE7 now supports RSS feeds. There's functionality there for managing subscriptions and reading feeds. The nice thing is the built-in rendering/conversion of a feed to a readable format. I haven't found a way to customize that view, but it is a nice touch.
CSS - I haven't had a lot of time to play around with CSS in IE7. I'll write about that in a future post.
XMLHTTP - From what I understand, IE7 features a built-in XMLHTTP object. I haven't had time to play around with this either, but it certainly fits in with their Live.com strategy.
That's all for now. Overall, its a nice browser. But I haven't really had time to delve in depth to the browser. I'll continue to play-around and post my findings.
Revisions
- v1.0 (10 Feb 2006) - Article published.
