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Internet Explorer 7

30 April 2006

Note: This post is about beta software. The final version may change.

Over the last few months, I've been seeing more and more information and screenshots of Internet Explorer 7. They certainly looked impressive (even if they were nowhere close to the ones on the new Windows Vista and Office) but I suspect that I might be making that judgement purely on the basis of the toolbars being shuffled around. To be honest, it's the first thing you notice when you see these screenshots. They're right at the top and there's nearly always a new set of buttons, or some dazzling new 3D effect.

Today, I decided to give IE7 a try. However, before I hit download, I decided to check a few details just to make sure it was a good idea.

• Firstly, most importantly, I checked to see if it was possible to uninstall the program, if I didn't like it. I'm not a big fan of permanent, irreversible changes and I was a bit doubtful especially considering the fact that IE is so heavily integrated into Windows. Fortunately, there was an uninstall method involving Add/Remove Programs documented on MSDN. Even if that didn't work, there's always System Restore.
• Secondly, I checked to see if there were any bugs that could cause IE7 to crash. There were some bugs but they only really happened in obscure situations that I'm unlikely to encounter. However, it is a beta product so there probably are some other, undiscovered bugs out there. Only time and extensive testing will tell me for sure.
• Finally, I looked to see what features had been removed. As before, this seemed OK since most of the features (such as GOPHER) were only used in obscure situations.

The initial download was reasonably fast (about 1% downloaded per second) but the installation routine could be better. The blue image as the background looked quite professional, like the backgrounds of other Microsoft installation wizards but unfortunately it made the buttons and other components on the form have a strange border on them. I suspect this might be because the buttons had been designed to work best on a plain grey background but I don't know for sure. Another problem was that when the actual installation took place, there was no real progress bar, just a few green rectangles flying across the screen. Since the installation took quite a long time, this was a bit annoying since I didn't know how far through the process it was.

After restarting the computer, I saw a new icon on the desktop showing IE7's new logo - an 'e' with a gold band round it. Clicking on this took me to Internet Explorer 7. I expected to arrive at Google, my home page but I was surprised to see the address bar flashing between URLs starting with go.msn.com and similar. I hoped that my homepage had not been reset to the default setting. Luckily, I was only seeing options to configure the browser, so this was OK.

I started exploring through a number of different options available but I particularly liked the zoom feature. When I had IE on full screen mode, I noticed that, apart from the web page itself, only the status bar was displayed. This drew my eye to the zoom feature and I soon found myself zooming in and out of web pages and even ending up with a giant version of Google staring at me. The zoom out feature also worked quite well for taking screenshots of web pages. Changing the zoom level in IE7 was quite similar to changing the text size in IE. However, the problem with changing text size is that it often messes up the layout of web pages and many pages don't support it at all. Zooming, however, zoomed in on images and all of the other elements of the web page so that the page still maintained its layout. Unfortunately, the main side effect is that you are required to use the horizontal scroll bar when zoomed in because the zoomed in width is always wider than normal, to keep the page layout the same.

One major problem with IE7 is that the laptop touch pad no longer has the ability to navigate back and foreword. Apart from that, it seems pretty good.

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