[] IE 7
Yup, I’m officially healthy again. No school yet though, except for my honours course in the evening.
So now I just downloaded IE 7. I kind of like it, I kind of don’t. Here’s what I don’t like so far:
- It still requires a reboot of my machine to install (and probably the same to uninstall). I know, OS integration and all… it still sucks!
- It looks awful, in my opinion, on the Windows classic theme in WinXP. Especially the new tab… thing, which is just a dark grey, well, blob, kind of thing, without any clear function. Unfocused tabs are the same kind of dark grey.
- It thinks about:blank should never end up in the back/forward history.
- I can’t set my homepage to a URL from the clearly visible UI (ie, there’s probably an option in the Options dialog, but the homepage UI only cares about the current tab).
- Not having the menu bar there unless I press the Alt key is inaccessible. It also leads to page shifts when I do want to use it, so that’s kind of annoying. The only way to make it always appear, as far as I’ve been able to figure out, is to right-click the toolbar on the tab bar (not anywhere else, as you’ll get no context menu or the window bar’s context menu) and select ‘Classic menu’. This is not really discoverable either, and I’m wondering how I’d get there without a mouse. Lastly, the menubar is positioned oddly, snuggled in between the url bar and the tabs and other useful buttons.
- The import feature failed to detect my Opera, Firefox, Flock and Seamonkey installs. I’m struggling to understand what else it would want to try to find to import bookmarks, cookies or feeds from (though I suppose for feeds there’d be certain feedreader stuff).
- I said ‘failed to detect’, what I mean is, the option to import from an application is greyed out, which I take to mean (without further indications) that it didn’t find anything I could import from.
- The favourites organizer thing in the menus is fugly. The buttons are badly anti-aliased,
for some odd reasonbecause ClearType is now enabled by default, just for IE. The favourites organizer popup in the toolbar closes whenever I delete something, making it hard to remove multiple things. I can’t select multiple items in it, and I can’t delete folders without using the slapped-on-very-long file context menu (why the hell is that there - I don’t want to virusscan my bookmarks, do I?). - There are no addons for blogging, del.icio.us, Technorati, anything remotely ‘interesting’ from a web perspective. What I did find were various download managers (why do people need those, incidentally?), and an 89-dollar “HTML and Header inspection application”. I’m already missing my Launchy menu, my webdeveloper toolbar (editing the CSS and seeing the results live - Microsoft, catch up here please!), ChatZilla (of course), BBCode formatting, and being able to write my own stuff for it. (I probably could write my own stuff, but it’d be run natively/compiled, which means mistakes you make can easily lead to crashes (such as with the 89-dollar app, according to the reviews)).
- Half the app is in Dutch (my Windows XP, and accordingly IE 6, is in Dutch), half in English (there was no language-specific IE 7 beta download, as far as I’ve been able to find).
- They stashed the Go menu in the View menu (which is large already, and that with 6 submenus too…)
- Unlocking the toolbars doesn’t allow me to move items (at least, I can’t figure out how to do so). By default, my tab bar has a >> sign at the right, under which are the Help and Windows Messenger buttons.
I can’t remove these buttons, as far as I can tell, nor can I make them appear on the toolbar normally.OK, it turns out I can make them appear after I right-click the toolbar and uncheck the ‘Lock position’ item. On that context menu, there’s also a Customize… option which allows me to remove them. However, the back/forward/urlbar/refresh/searchbar toolbar thing doesn’t have a context menu (it has the window bar menu, so I can close the application from there…). I’m still puzzled about what ‘Lock toolbars’ does in this case. I can’t move the toolbars above or below the menu bar, from what I can tell, nor can I have a toolbar on the same bar as the menu bar. - It doesn’t ship Google Search by default (huh?).
- Where is my bookmarks toolbar?
I’m done for now. What I did like was the feedreader. Firefox/Mozilla/SeaMonkey really really really needs something like that. All the Opera and IE people are going to be laughing their butts off every time we open a feed and get a nice display saying that this XML document doesn’t appear to have style information associated with it… We also can’t make live bookmarks from rss urls. Why is that? Firefox won’t even recognize the feed: urls this blogging software comes up with!