IE7: The Return Of The King

Browser wars are heating up again. You thought you were happy with your IE6 or FireFox. I thought I was happy with my Opera. And then the Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 has just arrived... I thought I was happy with my Opera, but through my curiosity I got attracted to try IE7 and was blinded by its beauty. Love at first sight. Of course the first thing you notice are tabs. I was not that great fan of tabbed browsing until I started using Opera, several months ago. Tabs in the Opera are just perfect. So it was somehow obvious to me they will be at least the same in IE7. But no... I don't know, how many million dollars Microsoft has spent on the design of tabs (or trying to replicate FireFox), but the end result is far from perfect. There are so many obvious areas to improve, it is just hard to imagine they have missed them (probably the IE7 team has been obsessed by FireFox to much).

First is the persistence of the session. With Opera you can open many tabs and close the entire browser without being asked a single question. And next time you open it up, all the tabs are there, exactly the way you opened them during previous session. Even after system reboot. With IE7, you have to explicitly tick the checkbox "open the tabs next time" when closing the browser, and if you happen to click the second checkbox "do not ask me this question again", the first checkbox unchecks itself. Grrrrrrrrrrr!!!!! And the tabs are not saved until you close the browser, so any crash you may experience in the middle brings you back just the homepage....

Second is the mouse moves required to open a favorite page. First click on a new tab (usually the right part of the screen) then move the mouse across the entire screen to the left, where the favorites pane opens and pick your link. In Opera the favorite’s pane is just below where the mouse stops after opening a new tab.

Then there is no concept of a local recycle bin. Sometimes it happens you close the wrong tab. In Opera the closed page can be retrieved from the bin, in IE7 it is just gone.

Of course there are many improvements. Security can be seen everywhere. Sites with invalid certificates will have the address bar painted in red, the security warnings are very clear and visible. This looks like number one priority for Microsoft, and seems to be very well done. The second item worth mentioning (actually the one that just blew me away) is Clear Type. Technology that used to be in Windows for years, but somehow not many applications have been using it. Strange, as the clarity of pages rendered by IE7 on my IBM T41 laptop just blew me away (I have to stress the impact...). Along with native IE7 pages, all applications using IE rendering have been upgraded to Clear Type. Notably HTML emails in Outlook. They look incredibly, almost like printed on paper. I can really feel the eye strain is very much reduced.

So far Clear Type seems to be the most important factor for me to keep IE7 as a default browser on my system. It is not perfect. But is much better than IE6. Of course I miss the Opera tabs, and I envy FireFox users the new Google Browser Sync, just hoping they will release an IE7 version (the access to user's favorites should be enough incentive for Google to help Microsoft here ;).