IE7 From a Firefox User's Perspective

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."

Opportunity

[Kelson]

I'll agree with the author on a number of things. Most critical is that IE7 requiring XP or later is an opportunity for other browsers [hyperborea.org], particularly Firefox and Opera. The majority of Windows users out there are on XP, but Windows 2000 and Windows 98 are sizable minorities. I know one site's stats aren't enough to judge the whole internet by, but my own site, with ~92% Windows users, shows 83% on XP, 5% on Win2k, 2.2% on Win98, and 1% on WinME. (That 1% on Windows Me is scary -- I'd almost rather run Windows 98.)

Firefox will go through the same thing next year, since Firefox 3 won't run on Windows 98 or Me, but it'll still run on Windows 2000. Of course, that's another 8-10 months for some users to upgrade (those percentages are about a third of what they were a year ago) -- and if you've gotten them hooked on Firefox while they're on Win98, they'll probably stick with it when they move to a new machine with XP/Vista. And in a year or two, as IE7 supplants IE6 and websites start targeting it, those holdout Windows 98 users might decide they're better off with a slightly-outdated Firefox 2 than a massively-outdated IE6.

Tarnished Brand

[Anonymous Coward]

I said it before and I'll say it again: the Internet Explorer brand is tarnished. No matter how great Microsoft makes IE in terms of functionality and security, most, if not all who have switched to Firefox or Opera (or Safari if they just went out and bought a Mac) have already made up their minds about IE.

All Microsoft can hope to do at this point is prevent more users from switching away, but that'll only work so long as IE7 doesn't become an exploitfest like its mildly-retarded predecessor. The next year or so will determine that as more IE6 users and malware authors migrate to IE7.

IE 7 RSS reader?

[Anonymous Coward]

No mention of the fantastic RSS reader that comes built-in with IE7.

Re:Opportunity? For what else?

[Gracenotes]

It's both good and bad that IE7 may be, in a sense, a wildcard. For one, it's good because those not running XP may switch to Firefox, as Kelson mentioned. The bad part is not that the masses who will use it will get a bad internet experience: IE7 should be fine for most people's internet needs (and wants). It's the fact that once the masses continue to take up IE7, Microsoft's potential whims on HTML code, and especially CSS, will have to become normal or else many will *gasp* become inconvenienced.

Back when Netscape was around en bloc and layers were the norm for many users, it was hell to code for both Netscape and Explorer, and often websites were split into two sections. So if Microsoft is trying to create a new and "better" standard, I don't fear Microsoft; I fear the complaining masses. The burden of being the (relatively) knowledgeable minority!

Re:Well....

[MooseMuffin]

Firefox works with my linksys router's config pages just fine. And as for it crashing, I'm sure its happened, but I can't remember the last time.

IE7 Text Rendering

[Keebler71]

I installed IE7 out of curiousity the other day. I use firefox but my wife uses IE. One thing that was immediately clear to me was that IE had substantially improved their text renderer. Text rendered in IE is substantially more readable and easy on the eyes than either IE6 or FF. If you don't believe me, try it within FF using IE tabs. Any idea on what they did to make the text so readable and how we get FF to render like this?

LiveBookmark Folders

[binaryspiral]

Uhg... Microsoft's implementation of RSS feeds sucks so bad.

I enjoy FireFox's live bookmarks because it gives me a quick and screen friendly way of scanning stories on sites like BBC, /., Wired, Woot, and all the other places I just don't have time to visit.

Microsoft's Answer: display as a normal website with prettier formatting - and advertisements.

One saving grace for IE 7's implemenation of RSS feeds - it syncs them with Outlook 2007, where I can scan them easily as if they were email messages.

My verdict? Firefox still wins this match.

FF 2 lacks a real page zoom

[Sleepy]

[disclaimer: this could have snuck in FF 2RC3 and I wouldn't have known... I only tested RC2, and don't see this feature in the RC3 release notes]

FireFox 2 lacks page zooming, which from a my perspective is impossible to live without on certain displays.
I'm a web developer (sometimes), and I love FireFox. As a developer I love FireFox because the Gecko team show consistent progress towards standards. From this perspective, FireFox is what the web should be. The worst thing about developing for FireFox is... writing broken code with comment hacks to support IE's nonstandard ways. But that's not FireFox's fault.

For DEMO or home theater purposes, FireFox is (on a high-res display) very very unusable.
Why?
FireFox 2 has no page Zoom. FireFox offers unchanged as a featurem plain old "Text zoom", which is not the same.

The fact that many pages don't scale to different resolutions well is not FireFox's fault.
But until all websites adopt a consistent method of page scaling, the workaround is going to be Page Zoom.

On a 42" LCD (1920x1080p), a fullscreen FireFox browser is legible from about 3 feet away (with my eyes).
If you make the text bigger, the page layout goes toast in FF. SURE, you can go in and change your video resolution to a non-native size and cause everything to get bigger, but that is not fun and it messes with other apps. The solution for now is some kind of liner scaling on the page.

On a 42" LCD (1920x1080p), a fullscreen Opera browser is legible from about 6 feet away (with my eyes), if you use Page Zoom of 180-200%. 200% really isn't needed, but there's some annoying artifacing In Opera if you resize at a factor of 1.8. 2x looks very nice!

I see IE has page zoom now, and I've done a little bit of testing. It seems no better than opera's at first glance. But it's THERE.

I'll continue rooting for FireFox privately, but it's hard to sell people on FireFox's importance... when you have to use Opera or MSIE on the big panel display.

Here's to FF 2.5 including this feature. One hopes! :-)

Re:Opportunity

[Foofoobar]

My mom ever so recently was told to upgrade by her ISP; in fact they told her to buy a whole new computer or else they wouldn't support her. After I screamed at them for this kind of attitude and for advising someone who is ignorant of such matters that they would need a whole new computer, I went out and bought her a new system and installed Ubuntu on it. Now her scanner, printer, digital camera that my brother bought her and speakers all work great. She never worries about viruses and LOVES firefox. It took her awhile to get used to tabs but now that she is, she wouldn't switch back to IE even if you paid her to move to Windows. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that at least 10% of these outdated systems may eventually switch. If they get fed up enough with things, they will. And I'm speaking as someone who has refused to upgrade my Win2k machine because it still works just fine for me including for playing games; I don;t have reason to upgrade but do want to use a decent browser.

Re:IE7 Text Rendering

[Keebler71]

Interesting. So IE7 renders using ClearType regardless of the Control Panel's display settings (display:appearance:effects ). For those who are interested - changing that setting in the OS obviously works for FF too. Thanks!

GUI is bad

[M0b1u5]

Sorry, but the GUI of IE7 is like someone without any knowledge of HCI or how people use browsers or PCs in general is responsible for the disaster that is IE7.

They had a clean slate to work with, and could have produced something truly intuitive, and highly usable, but instead they produce something which is only half a step away from dogshit. Honestly, separating the functional buttons is just stupid. To me, it appears that absolutely no research was done for the GUI, and they only spent money on the back end, and the graphics.

Removing the file menu is retarded.

So, to me, it doesn't matter how good IE7 is behind the curtains, the curtains themselves suck so bad that I simply will not use it.

The sad thing is that I'm not the least surprised by this: a unique opportunity completely missed, and Internet usability has been set back by at least a couple of years.

Re:FF 2 lacks a real page zoom

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't tried Firefox 2.0 yet, but at least under Linux Firefox 1.5 offers its own display resolution setting under Edit > Preferences > Content > Advanced button in Fonts & Colors > Display Resolution. I usually tweak that to a nonstandard value to bump the font size up without destroying layout, and it appears independent of the system display resolution (doesn't mess with other apps).

I've never seen Page Zoom in action so I don't know if this is a poor imitation or reasonably similar...

"long-time Firefox user"

[matt me]

Is there such a thing? It's still a child. It's not yet two years since the 1.0 release. I'd installed Firebird about a year before that. Before that it was the browser component of mozilla, and then way back it was netscape navigator! Essentially the interface is no different from it's ancestors. Much of what we like about Firefox is really the extensions (adblock, decent tab functionality) or disabled by default (find as you type) - and all this was upstream in Mozilla. The greatest distinction between Firefox/mozilla/etc and IE is the tabs, and frankly this is apalling "out the box" without any extensions. Multiple tabs, one window: fantastic. Multiple windows of IE = alright. Firefox "out the box" multiple tabs in multiple windows, new ones coming from nowhere all shapes and sizes = Confusing as hell. It's hardly surprising new users want to disable it, when they must guess at random what opens a window, what opens a tab.

The majority of the older mozilla userbase is on linux, think back to when mozilla was the default browser in debian, red hat, suse. only with firefox 1.0 did the development shift from this technical userbase to the hysterical evangelicals of firefox vs IE.

Re:ie better than firefox and opera in xml/ xsl

[wrook]

Huh???

I can't understand this. IE doesn't even preserve the encoding type on an XSL transform. I can't use it *at all* for my Japanese documents.

And it has unbelievably poor support for CSS. It won't even do tables. Not even in IE 7...

Your comment kind of blows me away...

slow

[kurtis25]

IE7 is to slow to be of use. I'm not on the best computer (not the worst either) but it's slow, takes forever to load a tab and to long to open up. FF is much faster on my machine, which is the biggest usability point. If I want to use a Web 2.0 ap say the ap formally known as writely I want it to open fast so I can take a note or check email quickly and move on with life. I don't want to wait for my computer to load things up. Two clicks to get to my RSS is two clicks to many. RSS didn't make much sense. It didn't pull over new articles for me to read I had to click on the feed. Oh wait they are probably going to start dropping MSFT ads into the feeds they display so the more pages I visit the more ads I see. Speed and simplicity are my bench marks. which makes the score IE 0 FF 2

Re:Tarnished Brand

[jawtheshark]

No... Simply No....

You are so wrong, you don't even see it. Internet Explorer is a tarnished brand for the people that read slashdot, for the people that care about interoperability, for those that care about standards. Outside of that world, there is a world where Microsoft is a good brand name, equivalent to Jaguar in cars! Microsoft is the brand that bring you computing, that *is* computing.

I know that what the above paragraph says is not true, but it is for millions and millions of people.... In the end Truth is not important, Image is... And apart from us rebellious geeks, Microsoft has the image it needs.

The worst part is, I've seen good IT people sticking to Microsoft... Convinced, that it is always the best choice (like IBM, in the time... yes, I was there back then...Fuck, I'm old)

Why I like IE7

[swalters1]

I have a slanted view, but I'll share it anyway. I program in VS 2005, I write ClickOnce Applications, my code works in IE6 and IE7. ASPX rendered pages work well in Opera, Netscape and Firefox (I do XML validation tests to make sure it does) It fails horribly in Safari (go mac!) ClickOnce works perfectly in IE6, IE7, and in Opera (with the appropriate setup) and Netscape (with a lot of setup). It fails constantly in FireFox, even with the plugins that are suppose to allow it to function. My advice to all business users who need deployment abilities, use IE6 or 7 it's easy it's fast and you don't have to mess with it. I'm actually waiting to test Firefox 2, I'm hoping that they fixed the ClickOnce Issues and that it's a stable deployment pathway for us, I have a lot of FireFox fan bouys (who by the way are almost, but not quite as bad as Mac users) and would love to make them happy. What I don't like in IE7: Menu bars! Come on! I'm using Vista RC2, and this doens't even make sense in the Vista Interface! Addons! I don't like that the wrong version of addons like Google, AOL, etc Stop it from working! Rendering Issues! They fixed the rendering problems in IE6 and now pages that correct pages because it thinks the browser is IE6 are now broken! Security Overkill on embedded controls, even ones with a genuine digital certificate. (yeah you can turn it down, but it's annoying that it has to be set so high!) What I do like: You can start IE7 in safe mode and have it disable all plugins if someone is dumb enough to load MSN toolbar, Google Toolbar or AOL toolbar (Can you tell I have a problem with tool bars?) Tabbed browsing: gotta have it. Favorites and History popouts. I know it's a gimick, but I like it. Zoom! Especially with my MS keyboard's zoom control (Hey I'm older my eyes get tired when I stare at 1600x1050 all day.) Improved Page Printing (it's minor an most people will never notice it) Multiple Home pages: I can open my browser, and pop, I have my home site, my work site and my favorite Game o' d month site. Anyway, my very slanted two cents worth.

Re:Opportunity

[Jonny 290]

Jesus fuck, dude. Do you sit down to piss?

I swore to fuck the post I'm replying to was written by the Penny Arcade "From my parents basement, i strike at thee, Gates!" guy.

Meanwhile, your line of thinking is dooming an entire generation of tech support workers to continue putting up with the bullshit that is a 98 box trying to get networking running. We don't tell people to upgrade because we're trying to make Bill Fucking Gates richer (hint: 98 tech support calls make US rich. 8% of the customer base, 40% of inbounds), we're telling them to upgrade because their computers are slow as dogshit and they're having a miserable time trying to get on this intraweb with the packard bell that their son so thoughtfully gave them seven years ago. They have no idea of Moore's law, no idea how much easier it is today.

I'm not sayin' that he should have told her to get a new computer...but I understand.

[1]If you're pretenious enough to think that your Slashdot post needs footnotes, you should at least fake it and make it more than one line long.

Re:ie better than firefox and opera in xml/ xsl

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL,

Pot kettle black --- anyone who calls a big missing feature a bug is a dummy. There are books made for your type.

XSL is huge! Add to this, there are other missing fuatures (bugs as you call them) like SMIL, that IE has had since 2000.

All of this said, IE is missing tons of features that FF has --- embedded images, javascript 1.7, etc. etc.

Hoping they get their act together for IE8, because IE7 sure takes a lot less memory than FF2.

Re:Opportunity

[Foofoobar]

Not really. I could have installed Ubuntu on her current system. But hey, she's my mom. So I figured I'd upgrade her whole computing experience. She practically wigged when I showed her GIMP and Open Office and everything. She thought I paid a fortune and didn't understand how it could all be 'free'.