It was a long time ago that people realised that Internet Explorer 6 was seriously flawed… like when it was released in 2001. Now it’s a running joke. The new version, IE7, is now available as a Preview version (aimed at technical users, the general-usage beta is slated for an summer April release). So far it seems nice, but I have a few minor (!) problems:
- The toolbar (File, View, Tools etc.) appeared the first time I ran the program, but now doesn’t, and there’s no obvious way of getting it back EDIT: Turns out that the toolbar is disabled by default (doesn’t explain why it appeared the first time I ran IE7!) but you can get it back by going to Tools (the icon at the top-right), then Toolbars, and choosing Classic Menu. Grr.
- The only way of seeing the browser history is via a keyboard shortcut, and if you didn’t have the presence of mind to guess that it would be Ctrl+H then you’d be totally stuck
- Various rendering problems – the fonts look a bit fuzzy in places, and a lot of AJAX doesn’t work. Hopefully these will be fixed
UPDATE: The new interface actually looks VERY Flock-like. Of course excessive use of silver, rounded corners etc. isn’t exclusive to Flock, but the appearance is very similar.
The feed handling ROCKS – similar to the likes of the Feedview extension for Firefox, but much more polished. You can actually view feeds as ordinary webpages as well as subscribing – although the subscription only seems to provide a link to the view page at the moment.