IE7 From a Firefox User's Perspective 250
Buertio writes, "A week with IE takes a look at IE7 from the perspective of a long-time Firefox user. The verdict? Microsoft has come a long way but still has some way to go before taking on Firefox and Opera."
Re:Opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, you can try and get your 98 and ME-using friends to use Firefox, but suggesting that it might be a good idea for the project as a whole to go after a small and shrinking segment of the population, particularly when that segment of the population is defined in part by not liking change, does not seem to be a winning strategy to me.
Before taking on Firefox and Opera? (Score:4, Insightful)
sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, considering it has the majority market share, it looks like they need to do nothing. They've already won the battle, it's up to Firefox and Opera to take on them.
Memory Issues (Score:4, Insightful)
Well.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't speak to Opera, by Firefox 1.5 crashes on me much more than IE6 ever did (based on experience with two different machines), and my experience with IE7 is that it is solid. And some sites using fancy forms (for example, my LinkSys/Cisco home router) don't work with FF at all.
Don't get me wrong, Firefox is still my default browser (I'm using it now), but by some meterics IE is more than a match.
Drawback (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:ie better than firefox and opera in xml/ xsl (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Opportunity? For what else? (Score:2, Insightful)
I doubt that many people who aren't running XP will switch to Firefox - the likelihood is that anyone in that situation who hasn't already switched won't understand and won't care.
Re:Before taking on Firefox and Opera? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a completely valid and highly useful way of looking at things. It actually makes more sense to me personally than going by aggregated statistics which lump all things together. Some sites are dominated by Firefox users. Other sites are not. The sites that are dominated by Firefox represent valid and lucrative markets in and of themselves. Of course if you aggregate everything together into one big lump, then in terms of numbers, IE is "winning". But that's not a very meaningful way to look at things. For exactly the same reason GDP is a horrible way to estimate economic health of a nation, and all the sane economists know this.
It's a matter of putting priority fixes first (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well.... (Score:3, Insightful)
IE7.. got it.. nothing to write home about. Cute upgrade. Still like Firefox a lot more.
Here's something to chew on. I know a whole bunch of people whose machines were seriously pwned because of IE exploits. Thats enough to turn you off a piece of software no matter how pretty they make it.
Of late it's keylogger crap to steal WoW accounts. Know three people who got caught by them. Not statistically worthwhile I agree. But if you knew three people who owned a Ford that exploded on them, chances are you wouldn't be wanting one of the same model not matter what the deal.
Re:Opportunity (Score:3, Insightful)
Also notice that IE7 *requires* a legal copy of Windows XP, you need to run through this WGA thing. And even if it's possible to circunvent it, it's unlikely that most of the people (who doesn't have windows license) will do it. So it's possible that a big number of XP users *will* install firefox, just for not being left behind of the IE7 users and firefox users.
Why do I care about limited platform support? (Score:2, Insightful)
On the otherhand, close integration between the OS and the browser can make for a more seamless experience (and DOJ interactions). IE 7 works on 75+% of the PCs in the world and probably nearly 100% of the PCs in companies with more than 500 employees.
Picking the nit (Score:1, Insightful)
Bad: Non-standard user interface, very limited customization, very limited platform support
Non-standard interface? Who's standard?
Limited customistation - ok you might have a point here. But honestly what do we need tool bars for?
Limited platform support !? What do you expect. You can't possibly list this as a con (well I guess you just did, but let be reasonable)
One of the biggest mistakes Microsoft made was dropping Windows 2000 support for IE so soon.
Why, w2k is 6 years old. That's old. In addition it is the last unencumbered version of windows, it is also going to be EOL'd soon. From a software developer perspective, I don't want people using w2k, it's old, and dirty.
fairly minimal interface, however, once you open a few tabs this interface starts to look cluttered because of the buttons placed along the right side of the tab bar... The menu bar is missing by default which further adds to the confusion. To make it appear hit ALT or right click on the toolbar and enable the menu bar.
First, it is a minimal interface. I think MS finally figured out that IT'S A WEB BROWSER. The browser is for browsing pages and that's really all the browser needs to do, contain pages. No really, why is a menu needed by default? I applaud this shift. There is no need to loose 30px of real estate to a menu that is used
As fot tabs; if they get croweded you can do one of three things. Open a new window with a new group of tabs. Not open so many tabs, I mean after all you can only usefully use one page at a time. Change the bar arrangement.
liked the thumbnail view of open tabs, however it'd be good to see the thumbnails scale so that if there's only a few tabs open they'd be larger and many tabs open they'd be smaller to reduce the need for scrolling
Man, everyone is a critic. My guess is scaling each page image dynamically would hurt performance. you'll notice that they are live previews of the pages (the refresh and stuff).
Also IE7 has gained a search bar much like most other browsers. By default it's set to Windows Live Search (aka MSN) but changing the default is as simple as clicking the dropdown arrow and installing a new search engine. It's a shame that there's not more choice in the default list but to be fair they've made it fairly simple to add new search engines. So the first thing I do is make Google the default.
It's not MS's job to go drum up a list of favorite search engines for everyone. If they were to be "fair" that list would be quite long. If you have a preference you can choose, if you don't you have a search engine sounds well engineered to me.
First impressions aside now it's time to get down to using the browser on a day to day basis. The first thing that I did was import my Firefox bookmarks.
Wait, I though you already added Google as the default search engine as the "first thing" you did?
Lack of bookmark import support is a good find! But honestly who is going to move from firefox to IE
I was unable to crash the browser through standard day to day usage and performance was reasonable on most websites, although performance on some sites that were heavy on JavaScript (such as AJAX sites like Gmail) was slower than Firefox and Opera.
You talk as if IE 6 crashes all the time, it doesn't
I think some logic consistency checking needs to be implemented in the authors head.
The idea of using the information bar was to stop bombarding users with dialog boxes. However, in their infinite wisdom they decided to put up a dialog box saying 'Did you notice the information bar?'
Re:IE7 Text Rendering (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless whether or not you like cleartype or not. IE7 should obey the system settings for that setting. I have turned off cleartype in XP, the text is to blurry for my taste, so it was quite annoying that IE7 did come with cleartype turned on by default and ignoring my system wide settings. How to turn off cleartype wasn't very intuitive either. Who would know that that setting is listed below multimedia?
Mod parent way, way down (Score:4, Insightful)
Now let's see. IE can't handle application/xhtml+xml. Its JavaScript implementation doesn't support any of the namespaced DOM functions (createElementNS, getAttributeNS, etc.) making it pretty much useless for any sort of dynamic handling of XML that contains multiple namespaces. Hell, IE7 fails 38% of the W3C's DOM test suite.
Obviously, MoFo has omitted several rather important things from their browser product, one of them happening to be the ability to load external entities. But to say that Opera doesn't support XSLT is just blatantly wrong, and while I certainly don't advocate working around broken browser behaviour, it's certainly something that's done a lot for IE -- I bet you could do it for Firefox's flaw, too, if you spent less time complaining and more time working.
IE7 has some cool stuff BUT ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Sorry IE, Firefox is too customizable! You are able to make it exactly how you want it.
Firefox For Life!
~RabidBunny~
Re:Opportunity (Score:2, Insightful)
Is anyone else confused by this?
Re:Opportunity (Score:3, Insightful)
Begone, androgynous blowhard.
[1]presumably to extend the grip of the fifth branch of government, Redmond
Re:Opportunity (Score:4, Insightful)
Non-standard UI is a non-issue (Score:3, Insightful)
The screenshots make MSIE look bizarre to me, but I am very sceptical that this will really put MS at any sort of disadvantage. To make a joke, here: they're just copying Apple again.
In the last 5 years or so, Apple has gone absolutely apeshit with apps that totally defy their earlier style guidelines. Nobody talks about MacOS's "consistent experience" anymore. What price did Apple end up paying for this? None. Did as many people leave MacOS in protest over the bizarre UIs, as migrated to MacOS after saying "ooh, shiney!!!"? Hell no. Nobody protested at all, except usability nerds, and we all know they have sticks up their butts, anyway. ;-)
Microsoft has probably learned something about human nature over the years. And perhaps one lesson they've learned, is that making bizarre arbitrary changes to UIs, is a good way to make people think something is "new and improved." It worked for Apple, so it will probably work for Microsoft.
IE7 is a functional browser, but not much else (Score:5, Insightful)
IE7 is far less integrated to the OS like IE6 was. Or at least it seems so. It used to be that you could open web addresses in My Computer and Explorer would "become" IE and navigate to the address. Now, doing the same thing triggers a Firefox window to open and navigate to the address, since Firefox is set to my default browser. Not a bad feature here, but interesting.
Another issue that I personally have, but won't apply to many others, is using a runas shortcut to get to Explorer. I used to have a shortcut that used runas to open IE6 as an administrator. Then I could type "Control Panel" or C:/ and go about my business with an admin window while still logged in as my normal restricted user. Very convenient and I rarely found myself logging on as an administrator to do anything. With IE7, it's merely a browser and you can't (that I've seen) get to the control panel or navigate the file system with it. If you type in C:\ for example, IE7 will open another Explorer window to the C: drive. What's really odd, though, is that this new window opens with the permissions of my restricted user even though the IE7 window was running as an administrator. Usually (or in the past) a window opened would inherit the user permissions of the parent. (FYI, pointing the runas shortcut to Windows Explorer doesn't work, nothing opens.)
Other than those issues, there's really no problems. It's a functional browser and not much else.
What misses the mark, though, is the majority of the add-ons for IE. I got excited once I started reading over the list until I realized most of the were not free. Paying for add-ons? Are you kidding me? Even the ones that are free sound good, but miss the mark when compared to similar add-ons that I'm familiar with.
There's an IESpell add-on that'll spell check text areas for you. Instead of underlining misspelled words like their Office app (and Firefox 2.0) does, you have to click a button to spell check the text areas for you. Functional, but annoying.
There's an InlineSearch add-on that'll find words as you type, ala Firefox or whoever had it first (I don't care who). However, instead of just searching as you type, you have to press Control-F first to open the search dialog along the bottom of the page. Maybe this is better for some people, but if you're going to copy something and make it different, at least give the option to make it behave like whatever you copied. The other problem with this add-on is that is only installs for the user who runs the
There's there's Fiddler which promises to be like LiveHTTPHeaders in Firefox. For the most part it is, but again, it just misses the mark. First, it's just another program and other than capturing HTTP requests that IE makes, I don't see how it's really an add-on for IE. Second, a big feature of LiveHTTPHeaders (and others, I'm sure) is that you can replay HTTP requests after modifying any of the request headers and see the results in the browser. Unless I missed something, Fiddler let's you replay the modified HTTP request, but only shows you the raw HTML response, instead of actually loading it into a browser window. Functional, but annoying.
There are others that are annoying, too, mostly be requiring administrator permissions for some obscure installation folder, but some are good. The NoMoreCookies add-on is useful since IE7's cookie management is non-existent. I did not find any way to delete individual cookies or view their contents. There's a DevToolbar that has some useful features, too.Not that I have a use for them, but there are StumbleUpon and MouseGesture add-ons for IE7, to
Re:Opportunity (Score:1, Insightful)
Hey, people out there with 300MHZ/32MB setups on Win95/98 need to friggin upgrade their pcs. I work for a tech support firm and one of our clients recently dropped support for Win9X (yes!). Windows Update no longer works for 98 users, thereby leaving their systems quite insecure (since so often to fix problems, the hard drive is formatted and the OS reinstalled) and a true hazard for the rest of the Internet, not to mention a hassle to support as the driver database is so small, the networking implementation so crappy, etc. etc.
Good for her ISP.
Re:Minimo (Score:3, Insightful)
minimo is far too big and too slow to be used in a mobile device. as much as i love mozilla on pc (using it since 1999) opera mobile is currently the best mobile browser.
great summary (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet the IE guys are microsoft read the article and are sulking about how their browser isn't ready to take on the competition. Oh well, I guess they can always take solace in their 88% market share.