Blows balls.

Fans of myself know im a die hard IE user, so if this is coming from me you know theres problems.

So where to start. When you open this travisty, the first problem is blatent.



Its fugly as sin. Taking from the firefox book Microsoft decided to Uggify the once elegently simple design of IE6. The back and forward buttons, address bar, and fucking annoying as shit search bar are locked in god damn place. Thats right. You're stuck with that shit. it sucked ass in firefox and it sucks ass here. If i want to search i'll go to a fucking search engine. The least you could do is let me get rid of the damn thing and move stuff around.

It also does tabs, but i hate tabs so i turned them off. Others that like tabs would probably leave that on.

This fucking toolbar annoyance leaks over into the formerly glorious Fullscreen mode.

Compare:

IE6


IE7


Note how simple ie6 fullscreen is. everything i want is on the one top bar leaving oodles and oodles of browsing space.

In IE7 those god damn motherfucking immovable bars at the top are back. God i hate that search bar. THERE AREN"T EVEN FUCKING MINIMIZE,RESTORE,CLOSE BUTTONS!

Aside from the visual assault there are other annoying things that shouldn't have changed.

Previously, control+tab would bring you back to the address bar. In IE7 it doesn't appear to do anything. Maybe thats a bug, it is a beta afterall.

The go button near the address bar stays there even if you have "dont show go button near address bar" checked. Thats probably a bug, but its still an eyesore.

Probably the biggest problem so far is that it is not integrated with explorer. When i open up and explorer window on my desktop and type http://www.google.com into the address bar, instead of transforming into IE as if by magic, it launches a new IE window.


Now aside from these problems there are a few improvements. There are some enhanced security features such as the anti-phishing tool. It also tries to make the user more aware of they're security when browsing.



IE7 also supports RSS feeds now. But the feed lister could use some work. As it stands right now it renders rss feeds nice and pretty when you click on the .rss file, but you can only save them to your favorites. It would be nice to have a feed list sidebar in the fashion of the history, favorites, and mediaplayer sidebars.

Its still faster than firefox in load time and page render speed. I dont know if they've made any major changes to the render engine so i wont really comment there.


It seems that in the end for the very minor changes in the browser, too much has been done wrong. All of the changes could have been integrated into the IE6 interface and it would have been welcomed with open arms. As it stands its an ugly, and less functional version of the browser i had on my machine not 30 minutes ago.

If i had wanted a hideous and crippling browser experience i would have downloaded firefox.

[Edited on July 28, 2005 at 7:20 PM. Reason : spelling.]

7/28/2005 7:20:18 PM

man, you're just hating on firefox here. i smell a flame war on the horizon.

7/28/2005 7:33:05 PM

well its like they tried to clone firefox and only took the bad parts.

7/28/2005 7:35:22 PM

I have been using technology since the time Microsoft started.

And I gotta say

Firefox has been one of the most innovative software ever.

Microsoft IE sucked balls compared to Netscape, but won the race cuz of ActiveX and better (read partial rendering) rendering without downloading the entire page...not to mention integrated with windows.

But Firefox has been the best browser I have ever used.

7/28/2005 7:47:07 PM

Ctrl Tab, I never knew that...

7/28/2005 7:47:24 PM

what do you expect from the beta version?

7/28/2005 7:54:48 PM

thats not an excuse for the number of useless graphical and UI changes.

bugs in the new features are fine.

but when they changed a previously working UI this much Beta is not an excuse.

7/28/2005 7:57:15 PM

Shaggy I would think those things will be configurable in the final version. If not they would have to be options in TweakUI. I would stick with IE6 for now because as you said it does look like balls, but I hate all the IE browsers. I used netscape till Firefox v0.9 haha. And yeah what is the point of having full screen with that toolbar.

But until MS gets some community driven creativity, they're not gonna be as good as firefox because extensions and themes are too valuable imho.

7/28/2005 8:15:16 PM

ctrl+tab cycles through the tabs in firefox and mozilla

i bet that's what it does in ie7 also

7/28/2005 8:24:37 PM

Quote :

"Microsoft IE sucked balls compared to Netscape, but won the race cuz of ActiveX and better (read partial rendering) rendering without downloading the entire page...not to mention integrated with windows."

This is so absolutely wrong it's rediculous. ActiveX and on the fly rendering were only one part of the MANY technical reasons why IE4 and 5 kicked the shit out of Netscape 3/4/6

7/28/2005 8:26:14 PM

Quote :

"ctrl+tab cycles through the tabs in firefox and mozilla i bet that's what it does in ie7 also "

ah. you are probably right. As i turned tabs off.

still, i hope that gets fixed in the final release

7/28/2005 8:29:17 PM

Try using F6. F6 selected the address bar in IE 5.5 and below. I don't know about IE6 because I never used it.

7/28/2005 9:07:58 PM

it does work in IE6

I uninstalled IE7 so i cant test it there.

7/28/2005 9:11:21 PM

^^ thanks for that

7/29/2005 10:41:55 AM

It works in firefox too BTW

7/29/2005 10:45:03 AM

I'll opt to stay away from the Internet Excrement 7 browser and keep with Safari/Firefox

7/29/2005 10:45:10 AM

Safari?

el oh el

7/29/2005 1:47:53 PM

Safari on my Mac, Firefox on my PC.

8/4/2005 12:51:33 PM

^im with ya on that, val

same here

-ZiP!-

8/4/2005 2:04:22 PM

what I really want to know is... does it render PNGs correctly?

8/5/2005 11:50:17 AM

I just use the SlimBrowser shell for IE. Best of both worlds. All the nice features of Firefox (tabbed browsing, integrated popup blocker, easy proxy use, integrated search engine, etc) and the compatibility of IE.

I tried Firefox one time, blows balls IMO.

8/5/2005 1:59:53 PM

Quote :

"what I really want to know is... does it render PNGs correctly? "

damn, i wish i would have tried that before i uninstalled it.

8/5/2005 2:07:43 PM

gotta have my forcastfox and foxytunes

8/5/2005 2:35:09 PM