Windows Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2
It has been some time since I last used the IE 7. The last time I did a review on it was when I tested it out in the release of the beta version for developers. This time, I tried the latest beta release for: public. Yes, the IE 7 has been out for public for quite some time already but I have yet to test it out. Something you should have realized by now is the change of names. No longer Microsoft IE but Windows IE now.
For this review, I am going to compare it to the IE 6 and the very first IE 7 beta. In the beta 2 release of IE 7, Microsoft still decided not to have the bar where you find File, View and all. Don’t know what you call it. But, it seems like an important feature went missing when it’s not there. The new beta also has a slightly improve GUI from the first beta. Now you have everything listed out in buttons instead of drop down menus. The Favorites button now “drops down” into a box. There is a button at the side of the box where you can pin it down to make it a “center”, just like what you get when you click on the favorites button in IE 6. The “Add to favorites” button is now right beside “Favorites”- which is a star icon. In the favorites center, you can find RSS feeds and history together with it. Now we know where the History button went to.
Also, in beta 2, you can have several home pages. How to? you ask. Thats what I was thinking when I saw the home page button with an arrow and space to list several pages. If you remember, there is this extra tab feature which Microsoft added in IE 7 to compete with Mozilla and other browsers out there. And there is the answer. When you start IE 7, depending on how many home pages you set, the number of tabs open in the same window and each of them in their own respective home page.
To pit it out against Mozilla, Microsoft also added another feature which I have not seen before in other browsers. Its called the “Quick Tabs”. When you click on this button, a page with thumbnails of every tab within that single IE window shows up, just like Microsoft Powerpoint Slide Sorter View. How amazing is that.
There is however one major flaw with this tab thingy. In Mozilla Firefox, when you use the center scroll button to click on a link, it opens that link in another tab in the same window. The IE 7 does the same. But it doesn’t allow you to click the “Back” or Forward” button in the same way! I got kind of irritated when I tried to do that. I clicked around everywhere with the center button as I was on an important page and I needed to read something before that page without interupting what I was doing. In the end, I got into the quick tabs page and clicked on one of the thumbnails with the scroll button… Voila… It closes that tab. What a disgrace that is.
And then, as some may know, I power my blog with WordPress. While writing, I have some tabs like setting the category for that post, adding password and such. These don’t work properly with IE 7. Whenever I click on the + or - sign, a window pops up asking me whether I would like to navigate away from the page. WHAT? These features don’t open a new page! Luckily, I have already upgraded to WP2, if not, all my writing would be in the drain.
Another problem with IE 7 is that it is still not very compatible with some sites. For example, I couldn’t use the new Yahoo! home page because it is only compatible with the old- and I mean really old, its a few years old- version IE, the IE 6. This is however an improvement over the first beta when I couldn’t even open my Yahoo Mailbox properly.
Some great improvements by Microsoft, but they still have a long way ahead.
P.S. I hate the new IE logo.