nickology.com - Nick's Rants >> IE7 - A mix of FireFox and OSX with a pinch of Microsoft Inefficiency


		nickology.com

"BS is 'Bull S***'. MS is even more of that. With a PHD, you Pile it Higher and Deeper." - X. Elliot


	Web Sites StarcraftII.fr MoxBlox 2005 Hatrack.com Jooce AUPPA Etheryl


	Syndication

Green Web Hosting! This site hosted by DreamHost.

IE7 - A mix of FireFox and OSX with a pinch of Microsoft Inefficiency

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

So Internet Explorer 7 is out and didn’t make that much noise. Most people have been steadily converting over to FireFox in the past few months and for good reasons too! But in all fairness, we should look at what IE7 has to offer.

Tabbed Windows

Tabbed windows is an idea that has existed for a long time. Safari, Firefox, and Opera have all had tabbed windows for a long time now and these have proved to be crucial tipping points to make people convert from IE to other browsers. In IE7, we find the same tabs with a slightly different design and two additional smaller tabs that appear by default: the “New Tab” tab and what I like to call the “Window Browser” tab. This tab allows you to see a mini-window of the sites you have open in tabs much like the F9 key in Mac OSX let you see all the windows you have open by scaling them down.

RSS Reader

RSS (Really Simple Sydication) is most awesome. Sites are starting to use this more and more and although the general public is still not using it enough, it seems like it was the next step in a logical transport of information on the web. Basically, sites can deliver RSS feeds to RSS readers that are either program based (run on the client’s computer) or web-based (run on web sites such as Google Reader). An RSS feed is a carefully parsed XML flow of data that can represent any data you would like. Most sites use it to send news to their viewers (CNN, BBC, etc) and others use it to send your personal email to you (Google). You can pretty much send anything you want through it. Back to IE7. IE7 comes with a built-in RSS reader much like Safari or Firefox (or Opera?) do. The RSS reader is simple but nothing to go wild about. Of course, Microsoft has planned on using this feature to “borrow” feeds from its users; if you read the fine print, just like Google, any RSS feed that you enter in IE will be stored on their servers and rendered available to the public by search or display.

Design

Visually, IE has done a good job at maximizing viewing space even when in standard mode. The menu bar has disappeared being mostly replaced by a Tools dropdown which renders common features accessable. The 15MB download (twice its predecessor I believe) does take up more memory than its previous versions but not to a dangerous extent - any machine will still run pretty smoothly.

What’s Next

This just covers the surface of what’s visible. What I’m really interested in is what the inner workings of IE have become. In IE6, we still had to code two different versions of our code for practically anything slightly fancy that we wanted to make. With the Web 2.0 coming up, I hope that IE will have finally gone towards meeting the W3C standards. In any case, with Internet Explorer losing ground every month, it won’t be long until they’re forced to either follow the standard or leave the market. They can no longer impose their will on users and programmers.

Posted by: Nick in • IT / Technology
(0) Comments | Permalink |

Digg this |

Other |

Share on Facebook


		nickology.com © was created and is maintained by Nicolas Jouannem. Copyright 2006 . All rights reserved. Contact me. (Ref: 41 )