The Browser Den

Windows Internet Explorer 7.0, Microsoft Corporation

Using IE7 on Windows XP

Good: Reliable, didn't encounter any compatibility issues
Bad: Some heavy JavaScript (AJAX) sites were slow, no automatic import of bookmarks/settings of modern browsers.

First impressions aside now it's time to get down to using the browser on a day to day basis. The first thing that I did was import my Firefox bookmarks. To my surprise the IE bookmark import wizard had not been improved so it was in the same state as it was in version 6.0. This means that the only application it can automatically import bookmarks from is Netscape 4.x! I'd have hoped that they would have spared a bit of time getting the import working flawlessly for at least Firefox as they want people who've converted to Firefox to switch back to IE. Fortunately, it's not too difficult to import manually just specify the path to your bookmarks.html file in your Firefox profile. However, not everyone is going to know the location of this file.

The bookmarks ('favorites' in IE speak) interface has been improved with the addition of the 'Favorites Center' which brings together History, RSS Feeds and Bookmarks in one sidebar. By default the Favorites Center is a floating dialog that will disappear when you click outside of its window, but it can be docked as a sidebar if you want to have it permanently in view. The Favorites Center is very similar to the 'Places' feature that is now scheduled for Firefox 3.0.

I was unable to crash the browser through standard day to day usage and performance was reasonable on most websites, although performance on some sites that were heavy on JavaScript (such as AJAX sites like Gmail) was slower than Firefox and Opera. However, most people wouldn't notice a problem. IE7 also handles AJAX sites differrently to IE6, XMLHttpRequest is now a native object rather than implemented as an ActiveX control, this should make cross browser development slightly easier.

IE still has the best full screen mode of all the browsers on Windows as the toolbars auto-hide after a few seconds. This makes IE good for displaying web-pages on a projector. By default you can't hide the toolbars in full screen mode on Firefox without an extension.

IE pioneered the 'Information Bar' in mainstream browsers when they released XP SP2, the purpose of the information bar is to alert users about popups or software that is trying to install so they can either ignore it or take appropriate action. The idea of using the information bar was to stop bombarding users with dialog boxes. However, in their infinite wisdom they decided to put up a dialog box saying 'Did you notice the information bar?' every time it appeared. Of course, it has an option to never show this again but some people just habitually hit OK when they see a dialog and will get that annoying box each time. This behaviour is also in IE7, can we not just scrap this dialog?

That's all that really caught the eye with IE7, it's definitely a major enough improvement to warrant the 7.0 version number but there's still a lot of work to do before I ditch Firefox as my day to day browser.

NEXT: Customising