Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 review

May 29, 2006 by Oliver
Filed under: Computers, Technology 

Firefox here at work I figured I could install IE7 without too much risk. And I must say it’s actually quite good.

Initial impressions

The most obvious feature is thye really minimalist chrome. The back and forward buttons are a little smaller and now to the left of the address bar; refresh and stop are to the right and then underneath that are tabs. By default there is no application menu (File, Edit, View etc). which strikes me as odd. But to the right of the tabs are other buttons to do common things that you’d normally use the menu for. Speaking of opening new tabs, there is a special thin blank tab to the right of the others that you click to open a new one.

Conditional tags

IE has a special feature called conditional tags that let you specif markup just for IE that other browsers ignore. This doesn’t seem to work in IE7. Unfortuantely this means a 1px rendering error is present on my blog. The irony being I’m assuming it’s been taken out because they think they don’t need it anymore…

Zoomin

The zoom feature is snazzy and most of all, actually works. It scales everything properly and still renders text as vectors. Even better is that the tab preview (thumbnails of all the tabs) just use zoomed out versions of the page. This means the thumbnails are completely live. Well almost. It seems you get snapshots of plugins (although they work fine when viewing a normal zoomed page, not the overview thingy).

It also works with the dev bar add on I installed.

Tabbed browsing

New to IE and probably the most requested feature (beyond standards compliance :P ). And it works. There are some subtle differences between it and Firefox which will take a little geting used to. For example IE puts the cross to close a tab on the tab itself instead of on the right. And newly opened tab appears immediately to the right of the currently opened one instead of at the end of the list.

Acid2

The acid test was invented to test a web browsers CSS standards compliance. Acid2 is it’s sequel. Well IE7 fails the Acid2 test miserably. I mean it’s truly awful. In Firefox and Opera you can at lest tell what you’re supposed to be looking at.

Opera, browsers, Microsoft]]>

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Comments

4 Comments on Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 review

  1. RyanC on Mon, 29th May 2006 2:11 pm

    2. < ![CDATA[No menubar - thats the trend that all recent MS applications are following - just look at Messenger, Media Player and so on.

    Bit annoying when you actually need the menu, but makes the windows much nicer and cleaner.]]>

  2. RyanC on Mon, 29th May 2006 2:14 pm

    3. I don’t use Firefox enough to notice, but I think I’d prefer it if the close button was attached to the object you’re closing not just on its own somewhere. Maybe if it were a configurable option?

  3. Oliver on Mon, 29th May 2006 4:12 pm

    4. I think the close button being attached to the tab a good thing, it’s just confusing when I’m used to it being somewhere else :P

  4. RyanC on Mon, 29th May 2006 11:48 pm

    5. < ![CDATA[Yeah I bet :)

    Isn't there a Firefox 2.0 coming out in the near future though, maybe this one will solve thos nasty memory leaks and performance issues?]]>