Here we blow again: the embarassing IE7 launch |
According to Microsoft they have heard us, and if you haven’t heard the Microsoft news of the day, the official version of Internet Explorer 7 has been released. If you’ve also stayed away from all the beta tests [Hmm IE7 Beta 2 review], the major thing you’ll notice visually is a revamped toolbar section — where is the home key?!?
Don’t get me wrong, the new menu area once you get used to it is an improvement, but under the hood it’s already sporting IE6 demons. Already reportedly shipping with an old Outlook Express bug that has been reported — mistakenly according to Microsoft — as a six month old IE7 vulnerability. The bug is fixed in Vista, which won’t be here for another couple months and an XP fix will be along a month from now. That’s right, don’t rush over to download IE7 — it will be coming via automatic download anyway — Outlook Express users. Add to the launch embarassment that Yahoo got their version of IE7 out first, complete with their own tweaks. I swear Hollywood couldn’t churn out a more lively script for how not to launch. Here we blow again, indeed.
I’m admittedly cynical over Internet Explorer after Microsoft turned its back on users and said they weren’t going to do anything new until Firefox lit a fire under their butts. Add to that a lot of me too, been there, done that ‘new’ features. IE7 feels more like “we’re catching up” than “we’re innovating” but hey, it’s better than IE6.
Faster? Yes. Sleeker? Yes. Better? A little, yes. Will it bring back those who switched to Firefox? Nope. Why not? One word: add-ons.
Room to grow in the add-on department
Yes, there are IEaddons, but the list isn’t comparable to the vast amount of Firefox plugins and is mixed with shareware and commercial offerings like Apple does with dashboard widgets. In fairness, you can check a box for “freeware only” but do that and watch the list become even smaller. For example, there are a grand total of 20 freeware privacy & security ieaddons compared to 148 for Firefox. From a developer perspective this is an advantage and opportunity so if you ask me as a developer which platform holds a better exposure opportunity the answer is Internet Explorer, but this post is written for users, not developers.
3% of Hmm readers are already using IE7, which includes me. Did I mention that I really am browsser agnostic? I will use IE7 about the same as I used IE6, which means lesser every day, but it will not go away until nobody uses IE any more (which won’t be anytime soon). The vast majority of those who get sucked into IE7 by November 1 by automatic update probably won’t care about any of the details herein.
How about you? Are you all over IE7? What are your favorite new features? Or are you mostly using a competing browser? I’ll admit that I am. I’ve moved past Internet Explorer as my primary browser — my browser of choice on Windows is Firefox. Maybe when Vista comes out I’ll be lured back, but right now I’m feeling a little Netscapish and blue E is but a fading memory.
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Yep, been using IE7 more and more since Beta 2 or so. Don’t have the patience anymore for the Firefox hangs and crashes and horrible memory management. Don’t care about clogging it up with extensions, I’d rather have a default browser that I’m happy with than bother keeping all my extensions/addons in sync from computer to computer.
I look at the extensions that I have installed on the Firefox install on this computer — Dom Inspector, Greasemonkey, Google Notebook, and Web Developer — and all but Greasemonkey(*) have equivalents available for IE7, and damned if I even remember what sites I had bothered installing Greasemonkey for anyway.
IE7’s crashed once on me since RC1, with Firefox 1.5 and beyond, it’s pretty much something that happens weekly. With the way I browse, it’s a huge annoyance to lose dozens of tabs that I had open and try to remember what I had and hadn’t seen. It’s good that there’s an extension for 1.5.x to save tabs, and that 2.0 will have it built in, but I much prefered the 1.0.x days when I could just open and open and open them, leave them open for days on end before getting through them, and not have to wonder with each new tab, “Is this going to be the one that crashes them all?”
The past couple of days, I’ve still probably used Firefox for more than 50% of my browsing (compared to 99.5% back when it was Firefox vs. IE6), but if they don’t get their sh*t together with 2.0, that number’s going to keep dropping.
Comment by n00b — October 19, 2006 @ 10:52 pm PST
Whoops, forgot the (*), which is: I know there are a couple of Greasemonkey act-alikes for IE, but the compatibility could be better. Haven’t investigated them in probably 6 months or so — maybe they’ve improved, or maybe they’ve died — ’cause like I noted above, I really don’t even know why I’m still bothering to keep Greasemonkey itself installed anymore.
Comment by n00b — October 19, 2006 @ 10:56 pm PST
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts, n00b.
Comment by TDavid — October 20, 2006 @ 11:41 am PST
[…] - The iPod exercise purchase (1) [oct 15] - Not Linked In, thankfully? (6) [oct 16] - Plasma to be replaced by laser TV? (5) [oct 18] - Here we blow again: the embarassing IE7 launch (2) [oct 19] “IE7’s crashed once on me since RC1, with Firefox 1.5 and beyond, it’s pretty much something that happens weekly. With the way I browse, it’s a huge annoyance to lose dozens of tabs that I had open and try to remember what I had and hadn’t seen. It’s good that there’s an extension for 1.5.x to save tabs, and that 2.0 will have it built in, but I much prefered the 1.0.x days when I could just open and open and open them, leave them open for days on end before getting through them, and not have to wonder with each new tab, “Is this going to be the one that crashes them all?”” – Comment by n00b — October 19, 2006 @ 10:52 pm […]
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