I have been using Firefox almost exclusively since it was called Firebird. Before that I used Mozilla – remember the t-rex in the upper right corner. The point is, I haven’t used IE for a full day of web browsing in years. Today, I gave it a shot using IE 7 Beta 3. Here is what I learned:
- The User Interface has a new light and clean feel. It isn’t over cluttered with menus or icons. I like this approach.
- Opening a new tab is painfully slow. It seems like it is using extra cycles to open the tab, load the tab with a blank page and then bring it to focus. It is quite noticeable.
- The much touted RSS subscription feature takes three clicks instead of Firefox’s one. A user has to click on the feed icon in the browser. This opens up the RSS feed in the browser with a link at the top to subscribe. Clicking this link brings up a new dialog asking where to save it at. After you click subscribe, you are taken back to the RSS feed instead of the page you started the subscription process from.
- Once you subscribe, the panel doesn’t show headlines in Favorites Center. You have to actually click on the feed name to see the feed. It also doesn’t show the number of feed items in parenthesis like most readers do. It does bold the feed name if there are new feed items.
- A positive feature of RSS is that does have the feed broken out nicely into categories with addition search and sort filters.
- The keyboard shortcuts I use daily in Firefox all worked perfectly with IE.
- It didn’t have a memory leak with multiple tabs open like Firefox does.
- When doing a blog post today, I went to right click on an image and copy the image location to the clipboard. The only option available was to click on properties and cut and paste the img src from the nasty ugly dialog box.
- I did not experience site incompatibilities with IE 7 Beta 3.
- I couldn’t find any cool plugins or extensions to download.
I’m not an Microsoft basher and I am rooting for them to create good products. I think it helps everyone. I am especially encouraged with little things like using the same RSS icon that the rest of the world uses. These are just some honest observations.
Technorati : Browsers, IE7, Internet Explorer, RSS