Internet Explorer 7 Gripes

Monthly Microsoft Patch Hides Tricky IE 7 Download by By John Pallatto in eWeek January 22, 2007. Yikes. 

December 19, 2006. Steve Bass, columnist for PC World magazine, rolled back IE7 to IE6 because "I've had too many scripting errors on pages I normally go to that work just fine with IE6."

December 6, 2006. On the Personal Computer Show, Hank Kee reported that he ran across a bug in IE7, and it was not at all obvious that the problem was with IE7. The error message had nothing to do with the real problem, which had to do with running programs off a network/mapped drive. Simply, put, he couldn't do it. There is a fix for this from Microsoft but it only works in Windows XP Professional, not in the Home Edition. 

Microsoft's new Web browser is a dud, and you have much better choices November 5, 2006 by Al Fasoldt. His main gripes: it only runs on XP SP2, it is far too integrated with the guts of Windows, it's new features aren't new at all - just Microsoft doing it's usual copying of innovation by others. And there were 3 bugs found in it on its first 3 days of existence. 

October 31, 2006. I printed a web page but nothing printed. The little printer icon appeared in the middle of the IE7 status bar for a couple seconds and then disappeared. The printer was not directly attached to the computer, it was on my LAN. To narrow down the problem, I printed something from Notepad and got an error. IE didn't mention any errors. Notepad is better at error reporting than IE7. Then I went to Printers and Faxes in the Control Panel and, sure enough, there was an error that it couldn't connect to the LAN based printer. I had a network problem. The gripe is that IE7 tells you nothing about the problem.

October 19, 2006: Installing a new version of Flash works differently than IE6. When its installed nothing happens. The usual couple prompts about installing ActiveX were not issued. After re-starting IE, I realized it had been installed.

October 19, 2006: One thing I liked about IE over Firefox was that you could add a Print Preview button to the toolbar. No more.

New Internet Explorer browser worth a look by Mike Himowitz in Baltimore Sun October 19, 2006. Quoting: "In IE7, only the forward and back buttons remain where they were. Stop and Refresh are on the right of the address bar, and the other important buttons have migrated to the lower right side of the toolbar. Even after using a beta version of IE7 for two months, I can't get accustomed to that change - every browser I've used has the Home button at the top left, and this one makes me search for it. A small issue? Maybe, but I now have to think about something I used to do automatically 200 times a day, and that's annoying."

IE 7 needs tweaking for safety By Brian Livingston. October 26, 2006. Quoting:  "...Internet Explorer 7.0 browser, which was released to the public last week ... still has weaknesses inherited from IE 6." The article describes "hardening" IE7.

Microsoft Upgrades Internet Explorer -- But Not Much Is New by Walter S. Mossberg in the WSJ October 19, 2006.

• ... if you are already using Firefox ... I see nothing in IE 7 that should make you switch. It's mostly a catch-up release, adding to IE some features long present in Firefox and other browsers.
• ...runs only on the latest revision of Windows XP and the forthcoming Windows Vista operating system, while Firefox offers nearly identical versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux computers.
• ...the most important new security feature in IE 7 ... will work only in the new Vista version of Windows...
• ...Some sites may not work properly in IE 7 because techniques they used are blocked by the new security features.
• ... it's disappointing that after five years, the best Microsoft could do was to mostly catch up to smaller competitors.

 
Firefox vs. IE 7 (IE7 having trouble with Google sites) by Robert Scoble  October 19, 2006. Quoting: "Some sites in it render very slow. Most notably for me, Google Reader ... I’m also using the new Firefox 2 and Firefox is a LOT faster".

In Internet Explorer 7 Review  by Paul Thurrott, he makes the following points. October 18, 2006. Direct quotes are in quotes, two items below are my paraphrasing. 

• "IE 7 sports a radically different user interface than its predecessor, IE 6. Maybe too radical ... the application menu is hidden by default, and commonly used buttons like Home and Print are now incongruously located on a second specialized toolbar, called the Command Bar, that is located on the right side of the application window. This design is unfortunate and will likely prove confusing to many users."
• "The IE menu system is hidden by default."
• "...you can't move the Command Bar into a new location ... "
• Clear type is enabled by default, even if it is off at the OS level. If you don't know this, you'll wonder why fonts on in web pages look different from the fonts outside of web pages. 
• There are two rendering modes. Classic (my term) renders pages like IE5 and IE6 used to. The new mode is called Standard mode and/or Strict mode and is more compliant with Internet standards. 
• "I'm not a big fan of the crazy layout of controls in IE 7 ..." 

I have no doubt this page will get much longer. I gave up on maintaining a gripes page for IE6. No sport in it. 

IE7 removed the Image Toolbar, the small four box bar that appeared when the mouse pointer hovered over a picture. The gripe is that it's gone for good as opposed to being off by default. 

To make the menu always visible, select "Menu Bar" in the Tools Command Bar menu.