IE7 is Now Available
IE7 is now available for download. I did this last night and I find the browser to be a big improvement over IE6, but it is not big enough to get me to leave Firefox.
Here are some of the things that I feel are good improvements:
Search: IE7 has added a search box in the top right corner. During the install process there is a single settings page. This page correctly identified my previous default search provider as Google. It allowed me to keep this. IE7 also allows you to add other search providers. They have a good selection of 30 and provide a relatively simple method for adding a site that is not included on the list.
Tabs: The tabs are very slick looking. Two management options are built in. One is a dropdown list of your currently opened tabs. The other is a page showing screenshots of all of the tabs. There are no settings (that i could find) in the menus to set tabbing preferences, but at least when I attempted to close the browser it sked me if I wished to re-open them again.
RSS: It identified the feeds on my page.
Add-ons: In the menu options, there is a link to an IE Add-ons site. This site is full of free and pay plugins -- most notably in my mind the Google toolbar was among them.
UI: The top of the browser is shorter, leaving more vertical room for web browsing.
Here are some of the things that I feel miss the mark:
UI: The buttons, though very pretty are scattered. The Back and Forth buttons are to the left of the browser, but the Stop and Refresh are on the right. Annoying.
Tabs: I want more advanced functionality than what is provided in the single pop-up box. Give me tab settings to manipulate and tweak to my liking.
Add-ons: There were a bunch of them, but I don't see many sexy ones.
It will be interesting to watch how this affects IE's market share. Radar currently gets 48% of its traffic from Firefox, 38% of its traffic from IE variants, 8% from Safari, and a number of other browser bring in the rest. Of the 38%, IE7 has 7%, which means it is at 2.7% of our traffic. Firefox 2.0 has 8% of the FF share for 3.8% of our traffic. We attract hardcore geeks (yes, you :-) and it will be interesting to see how these numbers change over the next couple of months. I think that on this site we will see an increase in IE7, but an overall dip in IE once FF 2.0 comes out.
Mary Jo Foley has the full rollout schedule and tips for people who don't want to install IE7.
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Comments: 5
[10.19.06 11:33 AM]
err...IE 7 supports native hanzi script but obviously your blog does not! The "百度.com" in the above post was baidu in hanzi...but your blog spits it out as jibberish. Something IE 6 does as well.
[10.19.06 11:42 AM]
You said it. I find the UI incredibly irritating. The most annoying thing to me about IE, is the lack of a menubar and no apparent way to get it to show up ABOVE the address bar. WHY?!? The UI of IE 7 does look scattered, as you said. It distracts my thought flow from what I'm trying to do, it doesn't seem user friendly to me.
As an alternative & free browser supporter, I like that MS has dropped the ball on the UI, since that will be what attracts or detracts the average users like my parents, who don't care what CSS or AJAX features they can pull out of a browser.
[10.19.06 07:08 PM]
"It will be interesting to watch how this affects IE's market share."
I'm not sure there will be much of a shift, given that Firefox 2.0 is around the corner, and most Firefox converts were dissatisfied with IE to begin with and thus made the switch.
We'll certainly see a lot of tech geeks try it out, but just like you weren't convinced to switch from FF, so too will many just try it due to its novelty -- at least that's what I think.
[10.20.06 07:29 AM]
One of the most important points about IE 7 is it's improved support for web standards - note that I said "improved" not "fixed". Though it's true that no browser is 100% compliant with the CSS and DOM specs, IE 6 was notoriously incompliant. This combined with it's marketshare effectively levied a tax on all web developers (esp. Ajax developers) that they had to budget extra time in the development cycle to make things work in IE and usually ended up with less maintainable code for their efforts.
IE 7 takes some positive steps, but they're still trailing Firefox in the spec compliance area nd therefore the developer productivity area.
And of course developer productivity ends up affecting normal users - less functionality on the web and increased cost of doing business on the web.
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Jim Blackburne [10.19.06 11:31 AM]
You neglect to mention IE 7's stellar support of International Domain Names. IDNs are poised to change the landscape significantly in the coming years as they allow consumers to search and direct navigate in their native language as well as allowing companies to brand in their native language. Meaning IE 7 allows, for example, a chinese user to type the more intuitive 百度.com, which is baidu.com in hanzi script, directly into the URL field. Something Firefox has supported for years.