 |
Long thought to be a particularly insecure web browser, Internet Explorer has finally gotten the makeover long promised by Microsoft.
This past Tuesday, Bill Gates and company made their next generation browser available to the public, and although some critics are not thrilled, other critics are taking a wait and see attitude.
With Firefox’s dramatic inroads into the browser market this past year (now installed on 25% of user’s computers as their primary browser) Microsoft had to do something. And they have.
So, what’s the big whoop about Internet Explorer 7?
Well, there’s tabbed browsing for a start, with an interface that seems to this observer to be a tad friendlier than Firefox’s much earlier entry into the realm of tabbed browsing. There’s the new Zoom feature (just like Opera, the favourite next generation browser of many VanRamblings’ readers). Readily accessible zooming allows old fogeys (like me) to zoom in and out of a page and not have to strain to read the often tiny print on a web page.
There’s also a whole bunch of other new features, including security protection (with a built-in phishing filter and a one-click browser history delete facility). Mention should be made, too, of IE7’s much enhanced search feature, which now includes Google, Yahoo and AOL.
Internet Explorer 7 is now available for download, so you may want to become the first person on your block to download IE7 (caveat emptor).
Note: A reader takes VanRamblings to task for not mentioning that IE7 is in beta version, and as such is itself insecure. Thanks to Sara for helping to keep VanRamblings on the straight and narrow (and by the way, IE6 or IE7, VanRamblings’ rendering in either Microsoft product sucks. We recommend either Firefox 1.5 — long our default browser — or Opera 8.5). The final version of Internet Explorer 7 is set to be released in June 2006.
Update … users report that Internet Explorer 7 is riddled with bugs: Now, Sara isn’t saying I told you so, although she might. Web maven and master of all he surveys — that would be VanRamblings’ webmaster, Michael Klassen — passes along this timely ZDNet article detailing the many, many bugs that early adopters of IE7 have found, ranging from a denial of service vulnerability to a conflict with McAfee security software, and so much more.
