IE7 seems pretty good
October 21, 2006Tonight I got around to downloading and installing Internet Explorer 7 on my PC at home. I’m liking it a lot– the UI is stripped down so that it does not hog up as much vertical space as before. I just like the uncluttered look they’ve achieved with the two main toolbars, shows they really put a lot of thought into what UI widgets you really need most often, and hid everything else. The old 80/20 rule at work.
And of course, they finally support tabbed browsing native, no need to install a separate plug-in. I really like the Quick Tab button, which shows thumbnails of all your open tabs so you can tell at a glance what’s in each of the tabs. Not a feature you’ll need or use all the time but it should come in handy.
Especially since it works quickly–click the QUick Tab button and the page instantly displays the thumbnails. In fact, IE7 in general seems quick, from initial start to loading new tabs. Definitely faster in all those tasks than Firefox.
On the other hand, I’m not liking the phishing filter. Activate it and supposedly IE will check with a service running at Microsoft.com to see if the site you’re viewing might be associated with a phishing attack. Nice in theory but it seems like whatever service is running at Microsoft.com must be under heavy load because it’s slow to respond. As a result clicking to view a new site is extremely slow because the browser waits for the phishing service to respond and verify that the url is safe to view. I suppose for inexperienced surfers it’s nice to have, but for me I’ve turned off that feature.
Overall it’s looking good. Didn’t think Microsoft had it in them to do a good solid upgrade like this.