The Browser Den

First Impressions

The first thing you will notice with IE7 is that the interface does not resemble a typical Windows XP application. At first glance it looks more like a Mac application with a fairly minimal interface, however, once you open a few tabs this interface starts to look cluttered because of the buttons placed along the right side of the tab bar. This reduces the space available to show tabs which is a bad idea for any power user.

The menu bar is missing by default which further adds to the confusion. To make it appear hit ALT or right click on the toolbar and enable the menu bar. By default the menu bar appears in an odd position between the address bar and the tab bar. There's no obvious way to move this (later on I found a way, but it should be simpler than this). If you install 3rd party toolbars such as the Google Toolbar they will appear between the address bar and the tab bar, you can hide the toolbars by right clicking on them and unchecking the toolbars you would like hidden.

I liked the thumbnail view of open tabs, however it'd be good to see the thumbnails scale so that if there's only a few tabs open they'd be larger and many tabs open they'd be smaller to reduce the need for scrolling. Another method to select an open tab is a drop down list by clicking the dropdown button next to the thumbnails icon.

Opening a new tab takes slightly longer for some reason than under Firefox or Opera, however, a nice touch is that by default when you open a new tab it displays a page that details the benefits of tabbed browsing and listing some shortcuts. There's an option to not show this page but that doesn't make any significant differences to the speed of tabbed browsing.

There's a built in Phishing Filter which I never managed to trigger on my day to day browsing (phishing has never been a problem for me), the filter has to be manually enabled (you may choose to disable it for privacy or performance reasons - although for most people I recommend switching it on). One thing that surprised me was the use of the term 'phishing' - from the company that likes to take established terms and create a new one (e.g. bookmarks became favorites) they decided to stick with a term that looks very unprofessional to those not in the know. On the other hand Firefox 2.0 is referring to phishing sites as 'Web Forgeries' and Opera is doing something similar. I'm still waiting for someone to ask what the 'pissing filter' is for!

You can manualy check whether a site is a suspected phishing site by clicking on the icon in the status bar. The status bar also has a useful page zoom function similar to that found in Opera and Microsoft Office. The zoom function is a welcome addition because the text resizing functions in IE6 were very poorly implemented.

Also IE7 has gained a search bar much like most other browsers. By default it's set to Windows Live Search (aka MSN) but changing the default is as simple as clicking the dropdown arrow and installing a new search engine. It's a shame that there's not more choice in the default list but to be fair they've made it fairly simple to add new search engines. So the first thing I do is make Google the default.

NEXT: Using IE7