Dec 29, 07:05
IE7 switch, the follow up
Two months ago I replaced my Firefox 2.0 with IE7. I wrote about the switch three weeks later, so I’m used to it now, used most of the features, learned the UI and shortcuts. So what was the benefits of switching? The downside, and the funny annoying stuff.
The new MS UI convention
One of the catchiest stuff in IE7 is the interface style, that is the windowing system style which has moved from classic windows(3.1, 9x,2000, and XP) to the new style(Vista), that has been used on the new Office family applications as well. The idea of tabbing and grouping functions and GUI/toolbars. IE7 is no exception, so menu bar is removed and only appears if you want it to, if you press ALT key the menu appears highlighting the File item.
Having most of the page activities grouped under a menu item on a separate toolbar with the label page that holds: saving pages, faving them, viewing source, zooming, textsize mod, etc… On the same bar there is the tools, help, print icon, RSS indication and home menu which is completly customizable. And this bar is on the same row that window-tabs aside.
T to the A to the B to the S
Opera, Safari and Firefox2 all have their close buttons on every tab. In IE7 the close(x-button) appears only on the tab that has focus so you can’t point-click-close a tab with one click. On the other hand, you can access what is called Quick Tabs which is a screen with a grid of all the open tabs with their screenshots, and every screenshot has a close button on the right-top corner.
Links bar and Favorites icons
I can’t open a browser window and start dialing URLs that I visit on daily basis, so I place them on a bar with full of links with big icons, thank god for the favicons that can save you reading and point click the icon that you want. Below is a screenshot of my browser while writing this.
Since I am a del.icio.us user, I wouldn’t need the Favorites stars, at least for now, so I was looking up a way to remove them from the UI, didn’t get there yet, taking the space that I don’t want to give up.
Performance, interaction and x-browser compatibility testing
I’m running on a 1GB ram + 2GHZ single Core, an IBM Thinkpad t-43. It is a little slower to start IE7 than starting FF2. Comparing to options you could get on FF2 such as spellcheck on texareas, and the wide range of extensions, IE7 comes short although some add-ons are available.
IE7 lets you know if you have Flash active-x objects on the page and informs you that you have to shift the focus to the active-x object before using it, I take that as a safe and clean way of informing users what they’re doing protecting them from sudden and unexpected clicks.
While I’ve taken IE7 for granted and been using it for testing my current designs and mark up I’m still not convinced that I could use it as my primary testing browser, FF2 still wins my heart on that.
One last thing I noticed while using IE7 is the fact that it is really slow on pages that send/receive many HTTPRequests, an example is a Netvibes page filled with RSS feeds that get updated on short intervals. FF did a better job on such pages and it was always light even while updating all my panels at the same time. Just a trade off that I can live with.
On another note I’m getting a little love back for Opera. I’ve been using the Opera Mini on my mobile, it’s flirting with me.
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Friday December 29, 2006
CypherHackz said:
and because of that, website designers must make sure that their designs must look good in all of these browsers, including this new IE.
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