Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Falls Short

09/02/2006

My expectations were high going into my test drive Microsofts latest incarnation of Internet Explorer, sadly, their much touted Browser fell very short of my expectations. While improvements have been made to the browser to make it more user friendly and secure, it seems most of the improvements are just eye candy. While I give them kudos on the attempt to do a much needed overhaul on their browser, it is going to take more than what they have done with it to convince me to make the switch back to IE.

The Install Process

Much to my dismay, the first thing I found upon attempting to even download this browser was that it required that you pass the Microsoft Genuine Advantage Validation Test. If this is all I have to do, then fine. Skip ahead 10 minutes, the Microsoft server is incredibly slow for late night downloading and it finally finishes downloading. To their credit, they have finally reduced it down to a small file size. 12.5MB is not too bad for a browser, though it is still about four times larger than all their competitors. Upon executing the file, it once again is required to pass the Microsoft Genuine Advantage Validation Test. Didnt I just do this 10 minutes ago? I am not sure what the Genuine Advantage is, the only benefit seems to be that you get to actually install their free products with only a partial headache instead of a full one. More to the point, the Genuine Advantage is a waste of time. Then comes the real downfall, all the patches for it. Come on, this thing was just released 3 days ago, how can it have enough patches that it takes 15 minutes over a high speed connection to download them all? Overall it is an extremely slow install process. It takes way more time than it should.

The Pros

I have to admit, Windows Internet Explorer 7 looks a lot better than IE6. Visually the whole thing is a lot cleaner. They have dramatically reduced the amount of buttons on top for a much more organized look. Also it allows you to set multiple home pages, which is a nice new feature too, while I can see the uses for it, it was useless for my browsing experience. Still it could be a useful innovation.
They have finally decided to catch up with the times with features that their competitors have had for years. They have included the quick search bar in the upper right-hand corner of the browser. This is a feature that has been available in both Opera and Firefox for as long as I can remember. While it does default to MSN, they have fortunately made that easy to change and you can be searching Google from there within seconds. This feature is nothing special, in fact, it is inherently more difficult to use than the same features in the other browsers because it takes more steps to change the default search.

Tabbed Browsing

By far the best thing I have seen them do to this browser was the inclusion of Tabbed Browsing. Again a feature that the competitors have had for a long time now. However, Microsoft did a decent job with the tabbed browsing on here. By default, when you click links that are supposed to open up a blank page in a new window, IE7 does just that. However, if you are one of those people who is using IE7 for its tabbed browsing, this is more than a bit irritating because you are trying to minimize the amount of windows in your task bar. Fortunately, this can be fixed with little effort and without having to download anything extra (which is more than I can say for Firefox). It can be changed by going into Internet Options into the Settings for Tabs and under the When a Pop-up is encountered heading, clicking Always Open Pop-ups in a New Tab. Personally I think they should change this to Open External Links in because Pop-ups are a negative thing and that is what this screams to me. I would not be surprised to see this changed before the final release.

The tab layout at the top is neat and orderly. The tabs will shrink to a standard readable size as you open more tabs and stay the same size no matter how many tabs you have open. Unfortunately because of the positioning of the tools menus, this only allows you to have 13 tabs open before they start becoming hidden. Then you have to start clicking through the right and left arrows on either side of the tabs to find what you are looking for. While 13 tabs may seem like a lot, this is very few for the power user on the internet who may at times have 20-30 or even more tabs open at a time. Also after opening about 19 tabs, the right click on IE7 starts to get sluggish. However, Microsoft did include a very nice solution to the problem of searching through tabs. It is called Quick Tabs. It follows the same basic idea that I am seeing with several of their other products. It displays a miniature screen shot of all your open tabs in one window. It is extremely useful. I give them an A for their innovation on this one as I have yet to see this on the browsers of the competition.


Favorites Handling

Internet Explorer does a decent job of handling bookmarks. It is not great by far and it could use a lot of work. The new Microsoft thing is to use a picture of a star for their favorites menu. I know the star has been their symbol of the favorites for quite some time now, but will the novice user know that? Probably not. Also they have a second button next to the favorites menu with a star and a plus sign on that. It is supposed to be a quick add for the favorites, but it is just as many steps to add it through that method as it was to just leave the add feature under the favorites menu. However I was able to easily import my favorites from Firefox and sorting them was very simple too.

Improvements Are Needed

RSS feeds are a big thing in the upcoming browser war and I consider the IE RSS feed feature to be a miserable failure. I was expecting an easy to use feature that would give me the headlines and names of the sites for all the RSS feeds I subscribed to. WRONG! It requires a bit of poking around, but it eventually works, eventually displaying the contents of the sites without all the pretty pictures. How nice. Often times it is easier to just go to the original website than to wade through their RSS feature.

The Phishing Filter so far has rendered itself useless . After visiting several sites that were obviously Phishing scams, it turned up nothing. It did nothing to stop me from entering personal information in that would have potentially lead to identity theft. This feature still has major issues.

Add-ons are another feature that could sorely use improvement. The thought is there, but it sadly falls short. The inability to skin my browser left me disappointed and I was even more disappointed to find out that there was a large portion of these Add-ons available that cost money and are only there to do what IE7 is supposed to do by default. I will cut them some slack because this browser is still in beta, but making us pay for the Add-ons is just plain stupid.

CSS Support

I bolded this particular one because this is one thing about Internet Explorer that completely irritates me. The support for Web Standards is awful. Internet Explorer 7 completely failed the Web Standards Acid Test. I design web pages mostly in CSS. The problem with this is that they display correctly in any browser but Internet Explorer. I was hoping for a vast improvement in CSS support with IE7. It did not improve at all. I am highly disappointed with that.

Final Thoughts

While it looks nice, it just did not cut it for me. I did not find it to be up to my standards for a good web browsing experience. While it has made massive amounts of progress in the right direction, the changes are not good enough to keep me using it. The entire browsing experience is quite a bit slower than any of the other browsers on the market, the cache works about half the time, the feature to remember the password works about 75% of the time, and the textless interface, while it looks nice, in terms of usability, it is awful. Bring back our menus at the top and you are less likely to confuse people. This browser is basically the same as IE6 with a new look and a few new features, but nothing really special. While it is better than its predecessor, this browser is just barely up with the times and its lack of CSS support throws it back far behind its competitors. Maybe they will have some real innovation when they release IE8 in a few years.

Rating: 2.5/5