the mini Blog

I downloaded a *cough* legal *cough* version of IE 7 to test out. I was expecting some big things but I am really disappointed. The biggest annoyance is that the toolbar is messed up. Microsoft have gone with their own thought and totally moved everything so it is hard to get around. It has had me frustrated that the refresh and ’stop refresh’ is on the right hand side of the address bar and all that is on the left is the backward and forward. Once more, you can’t even change this. The only thing(s) that you can move are the ‘toolbar’ buttons that can be seen on the right hand side in the screenshot above. This also contributes to the fact that the tabs have a smaller space (you can move the ‘toolbar’ buttons though below the tabs). There are also two buttons on the left hand side of the tabs that take up a bit of space and are virtually of no use. They simply help organise and add links to your favourites. The last thing to mention, which is perhaps the most annoying, is that the file menu is now gone. Unless you restore it through the ‘tools’ button, or press ‘alt’ when you need it, it doesn’t appear. So you can restore it, but it places itself below the address bar as seen below. This makes the whole window look absolutely stupid.

A few interesting things to note are:
- In the window bar, IE now says “Windows Internet Explorer” and not “Microsoft Internet Explorer”
- The IE search bar defaults to Google. I’m not sure whether this is a bug, or it retrieved some of my settings from somewhere, but when I first opened it it had Google on the search bar.
- When you first open IE, ‘ClearType’ is on which makes the text Anti-Aliased. I hate ‘ClearType’ because it never does anything good for me and makes all the text blurry. I think OS X has some sort of Anti-Aliasing on fonts bu they are much nicer.
- Page loads are faster than IE 6, but not by much.
- RSS isn’t handled badly at all, much better than I thought it would be.

Overall I think it isn’t too bad. Some of the changes that they have made to the layout can be annoying and it would take some getting used to. I like the interface, it is nice and clean and looks quite cool. If I could move the buttons around as freely as possible I wouldn’t mind using it (when I am on a Windows machine), not that I would though.