Prompt's TechBlog

For all the talk of Internet Explorer losing ground to Firefox, it's still the dominant web browser. Website designers must bow down before its idiosyncrasies and users of standards-compliant browsers like Firefox must either keep IE in reserve for when sites fail, or accept that certain sites will always be closed to them. However much some people insist Firefox is superior, and whatever domain registration stunts they come up with, IE isn't going away.

Now Microsoft has released the first upgrade to its browser in five years. IE7 is being sent out automatically to users as a high priority update.

Having just downloaded it, it's very annoying. They've moved all the icons around, so that my learned behaviour of five years doesn't work any more. A page fails, my mouse moves almost automatically to the refresh button and it's not there. And I waste a few minutes rolling around the screen and looking for where they've hidden it. There isn't even a File or Favorites menu any more. I'm too afraid to push the 'favorites center' button right now, in case it replaces this blog post in progress.

Is it a better design? Maybe. It introduces tabbed browsing, a popular feature that Firefox and Opera have been using for years, but which was arguably originally inspired by the arrangements of program buttons on Microsoft's own Windows task bar. The interface seems to take up less space than it used to, which means there's more space to view webpages in. And I've long thought that the browser should provide navigation features specific to the site you're on, and it seems that you can now have your website's own search engine integrated with the browser. There's also a new antiphishing feature, if you'd rather send details of every site you visit to Microsoft than trust your instinct and common sense about whether a site's legit or not. This feature is either better or worse than the antiphishing feature in Firefox, depending on who's paying for the research, it seems.

Sooner or later, I'll learn how to use it. But it is like starting over and right now, that's just a nuisance. Sure, the browser's supposed to be more secure. But that's an invisible benefit. What I see day to day is the hassle of learning to use a new browser from scratch. The benefit of doing this over, say, not bothering to use IE any more, is minimal. And since I'm one of the people who uses Firefox alongside IE (and uses Firefox in preference to IE on sites that are properly designed), I don't particularly need to invest the time in learning a new browser. I've still got one that works fine.