Metropol

..and then quickly uninstall it.

For some reason, I use IE. Firefox has never grown on me and whilst I appreciate it's a helluva better browser in many respects, something has always kept me to IE. So I was hopeful that a lot of FF's decent bits would be replicated in IE and this week, for the first time, us in the outside world got to try a beta version of IE7. And boy, is it crap.

For starters, from the sounds of things MS has been busy breaking the various CSS hacks which make sites look half decent in IE6 and not actually fixing the original problem in the first place. There's also the lack of decent stuff browsers like FF have - the find as you type, feeds in the style of bookmarks, simple add-on manager etc..

But the biggest problem is with the GUI. They've basically taken 15 years of standards and aspects people have got used to and thrown it out the window. So now we have the menu bar underneath the address bar (which is rooted to the very top). The menu bar is hidden by default - with most of the options crammed into a 'Tools' icon. Icons are now all over the place around the top 1/3 of the screen and the graphics look rubbish (back/forward) or make no sense (stop).

I know it's a beta but it's very underwhelming.

it won't install as it says my copy of windows is "not genuine". How rude

Hymagumba wrote:it won't install as it says my copy of windows is "not genuine". How rude

And is it genuine?

cdd wrote:

Hymagumba wrote:it won't install as it says my copy of windows is "not genuine". How rude

And is it genuine?

it's half genuine. I do have an XP Home licence but I use pro (Time never ever did bother to send me the CD for home or a "restore pack" that worked, so i gave up and just nabbed one off p2p)

Just trying it out now. I do like the 'thumbnails' of all the different IE windows you have open. Easy to jump from window to window.

That is quite nice, but it's not enough to tear me from Firefox.

(I'm on a Mac anyway, so can't even try it out. Bugger.)

As a certain Mr Pipkin would have said...

"Don't like it."

I do hope an option is provided to customise the toolbars to allow you to at least set up a "classic" Internet Explorer look and feel as opposed to that crappy skin (at least, I think its supposed to be a skin) it has by default.

I loathed everything now being aligned to the right of the screen, as it looks silly on bigger resolutions such as my 1280x1024. Not too keen on the way the menus are laid out either.

Easy to crash, but as its a beta, that's expected.

Web surfing wise, well it does seem a damn sight faster in that respect over IE6 though. The tabbed browsing is working, though the colours are confusing and (to me anyway) seem back to front. Not too obvious where to click to open a new tab either.

Has potential BUT still needs a lot of work and some new stuff as well as detailed above.

Neil Jones wrote:Easy to crash, but as its a beta, that's expected.

No no, that's not the beta's fault, that's just Microsoft

My copy's legal (unless Toshiba have decided to sell illegal copies of Windows!) but it won'jt activate for some stupid reason.

Ive been using it for a few days now- Tried opera and FF but the big issue was some of the sites i use are broken in FF and Opera.

come of the things in IE7 are great - especaly getting up a tab group and being able to open them with just 3 clicks (i usualy open about 7 things when I start brownsing)
It seems faster than IE6 - jsut have to get used to not closing the browser when I jsut want to close a tab.

nidave wrote:Ive been using it for a few days now- Tried opera and FF but the big issue was some of the sites i use are broken in FF and Opera.

which sites?

not the sort of sites I would air in public, actuly they are not that bad just some if the sites use MSXML and FF and Opera dosent seem to like it - they tend to get caught continusaly refreshing the page or missing things out.