Previewing the Headache of the Future?
Ask anyone who makes websites what is the single most frustrating part of their job and I’ll bet many of them will say it’s working on cross-browser compatibility. Unlike just about any other kind of interface/graphic design, websites have to work in all sorts of environments. They have to work in all of the popular browsers for a start, and with more and more people using their mobile phones and PDAs to access the net it’s becoming more important by the day to take that into account too.
So when Microsoft release a new version of Internet Explorer, the most commonly used browser on the planet, it’s a Big Deal.
Having done a little bit of Internet Explorer 7 testing through BrowserCam I had a pretty good idea of what to expect: A shiny new interface, tabbed browsing and RSS support. Many of the more frustrating CSS bugs and missing features are also apparently fixed. I haven’t had much of a chance to test IE7’s CSS capabilities/shortfalls myself yet, but it seems to be a huge improvement over IE6 even if some problems do remain.
But what’s it like to use? Well it’s good enough that I have been using it for the past day instead of FireFox which certainly says something. Tabbed browsing works more or less exactly the same as in FireFox but there is the addition of a very handy ‘quick tabs’ button that lets you view thumbnails of all of the open tabs at once, eliminating the need to ctrl-tab 10 times to find what you were after. Another hugely useful feature allows you to save all of the open tabs when the browser is closed, something I previously achieved with FireFox’s SessionSaver extension.
IE7 also catches up with the rest of the world by offering a search box at the top of the page, which IE6 users will instantly wonder how they lived without. Surprisingly mine was set to search Google by default; presumably a result of previous settings being carried across from IE6.
If the above screenshot was your first look at IE7 then one of the first things you noticed was probably the lack of a standard File | Edit | Tools menu as seen in just about every program you ever used. The icons to the left and right of the open tabs replace these, but I would expect many of the less techy users to be pretty confused by this change. You can actually bring the ‘old school’ toolbars back by pressing ALT on your keyboard at any time and they can be turned on permanently in the settings, but by default it is turned off. My guess is Microsoft will be getting a lot of support calls about that one, but personally I think it’s a great feature that saves valuable screen space.
Support for RSS feeds is really the only other big feature addition and on the whole it seems pretty average. I’d have thought anyone who regularly catches up with lots the updates on a large number of sites would still want a dedicated RSS reader, but maybe for casual users it will be enough.
Overall verdict? Well from a developer’s point of view I have yet to see just how much of an improvement has been made in how pages are rendered, so I’ll have to reserve judgement. But as far as the user experience goes, I like it. It’s a huge improvement on IE6 and since it doesn’t seem to have the memory leak problems that plague FireFox I will definitely be persevering with it as a main browser. I’m sure that even once the currently unthinkable happens and IE6 support can be phased out there will still be a need to spend time double and triple checking that everything is behaving as it should, but with any luck I’ll be reaching for the paracetamol a little less often. Roll on the official release!
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