Albert Tanutama

Microsoft IE team has launched the beta version of their upcoming browser version 7 at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/. Take note that side-by-side installs with IE6 is not supported with IE7. So, it’ll take a leap of faith using the new browser. Fortunately, it works nicely although it takes me quite some time to get used to it.

Two of the most important and obvious features of the new IE browser are tabs and RSS support. The tab browsing in IE works much like Opera than Firefox. There is a dedicated button to launch a new tab window, and each tab has a button to close it. IE7 is capable to handle a lot of browser tabs. It has “Quick tab” feature that will display thumbnails of all open tabs in a single window, much like slide sorter feature in PowerPoint. Additionally, IE will hide earlier tabs rather than squeezing them all in a single display window, making it looks (and works) better than Firefox and Opera tab browsing.

The RSS support makes it easy for downloading, storing, and accessing RSS feeds – as well as (searching?), sorting and filtering content. It works pretty well – I’m currently trying to figure out if I could use it to replace my existing news aggregator (I like that it could archive all items – but let’s see if it could perform well with large amount of content).

However, the IE 7 is not without any problems or difficulties. I’m having difficulty to adjust the fact that the navigation button is now at the top, file menu toolbar in the middle (you can tweak it tho), and homepage button is placed along the tabs. It initially crashed after I tried to reorganize my favorites (which somehow was no longer properly categorized after I installed IE7). As a result, I have to manually sort my favorites via my Windows Explorer. I didn’t realize tab group features until I read its complete features list . And I almost thought that I could not import my feed because I hide my File menu toolbar (otherwise, there isn’t much left to see with so many toolbars included). And I need to adjust my new google toolbar every now and then because it disappeared when I launched a new tab (a display bug?).

Overall, I’m pleased with IE7, although I’m currently blogging this post using Performancing (which runs under Firefox).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 at 7:02 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.