Unlike some past Microsoft products, IE actually looks and works great. Now you have a reason to upgrade your browser.
Let’s face it, IE6 really wasn’t much of an improvement over IE5. Most people felt the only reason to move to IE6 was because it was free and it bundled a series of updates (mostly security updates) into a single package. Strangely enough, even though other browsers like Firefox, Opera, and Netscape have advanced in features substantially, IE6 has held its own and has at times taken market share back from the new browsers. This is largely because of compatibility. Companies, particularly for internal sites, often default to IE and the other browsers just didn’t work as well, forcing folks to grudgingly use IE some of the time. People just do not like to switch back and forth between similar products.
In addition, exploits were written against the Mozilla based browsers. Viruses and phishing style attacks worked equally well with everyone lowering the perceived security benefits of the newer platforms. Still, IE6 looked and felt old and the new upstarts provided a number of features and, particularly in the case of AOL’s Netscape, a number of unique protections that kept them in the news and often recommended. Well that was then and this is now.
IE7: What Happens when Microsoft uses an “A” Team
There are a lot of product initiatives at Microsoft that seem to be treading water. The development teams just do not seem to have a passion for the products they are husbanding. IE7 wasn’t one of them; these folks clearly put their heart into this offering and it shows.
Microsoft had to close a huge gap and many will still say accurately that there are advantages in some of the other browsers in one or more areas; but compared to IE6, version 7 is light years ahead. Realize that Microsoft apparently did this without breaking compatibility as badly as the other browsers typically have to do.
The biggest problem with IE7 for many is that the new browser will only run on Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2. Recall that one of the major focuses of IE7 is security and Windows XP SP2 is the most secure shipping version of Windows today. IE7 has to depend on the current security capabilities of the platform to work correctly and if they did put it on older versions of Windows you would in effect end up with Windows XP SP2 after the various parts were updated to get security working properly.
The end result is much more reliable although arguably, the most secure version will be on Windows Vista which will not ship until early next year.
IE7 Experience
I’ve been using the beta of IE7 for several months now and even though it has compatibility problems (that have since been fixed) I have found it easy to live with and hard to give up. There is a new interface to deal with, but I run a number of machines and moving between IE6 and IE7 never really seemed to be much of a problem.
Tabbed Browsing is well executed and yes Opera was the browser that initially set a very high bar for this, but it works very well in IE7 and new pages load in the background so you can continue to read the current page undisturbed while they load. This is particularly helpful if you are on a very slow DSL service like I am (I am so looking forward to the next generation of DSL).
You’ll love search and unless you’ve run Opera, this global capability will probably be new to you. You can in one place pick a selection of search engines which is handy because specialized search engines like ASK and ChaCha are better for some things or some people than Google or Microsoft.
IE7 actually seems to support JavaScript much better which probably is partially the result of the warming relationship (sort of) between Sun and Microsoft.
Security Improvements are Massive
If you like RSS feeds, IE7 loves them and discovery is vastly improved. For those that like to go places they shouldn’t, being able to delete history is much easier and much more granular which leads us into a broad discussion about security.
One of the most important features is that the address of the site always shows up regardless of how hard the site owners try to hide it. This has been a huge problem with phishing attacks that take you to a site that looks legitimate but only has one purpose and that is to capture your ID and password. In IE 6 you needed to learn to actually look at the address in the bottom of the browser to see what site you were on. You should upgrade to IE7 since this feature alone could save your identity. Anti-phishing actually goes beyond this and when you go to a site, it checks the address against a database of known hostile sites. If you hit a bad site, it puts up big warnings that suggest you get the heck out of there and maybe go wash your hands just to be safe. (OK, I’m kidding on the wash your hands thing).
There will still be some compatibility problems with sites that use ActiveX and scripting. Since both have been used in hostile ways in the past, IE7 treats them very carefully but it may cause some things not to work. Generally you’ll just get a new set of warnings, but sometimes the site may not run properly. Since many people have turned both ActiveX and scripting support off in IE6 this will still be better than none of them working at all.
If you (or your kids) disable these safety settings, security warnings will go off until you restore security settings. This has been a big problem in families and I know of one that picked up over a thousand viruses (no wonder their machine ran slowly) partially as a result of this practice and not running AV software. You can then easily restore the security settings.
IE7 Wrap
Moving from IE6 to IE7 is kind of like what you experience buying your first new car after driving a decade old hand-me-down through school. You suddenly realize what you’ve been missing. The security improvements alone make this worthwhile, and since the price is very reasonable (free) there is no real reason not to install and use it except that it may not run on your PC. Then again, maybe its time for a new PC since we are entering what should be a massive buyers market, but we’ll save that for another time.
In the end this showcases what Microsoft can do when they put an “A” team on a project, and our hope that this will become more of the rule than the exception going forward.
Showing 38 comments
RSSI just wish there was a way to get compensated for all the wasted time spent trying to get things to work in these lame browsers. Is there a class action suit I could join or something?
I'm glad you enjoy it, but it's a horribly written program compared to every other browser. I found this page looking for more hacks in height issues and that is why I am commenting.
Although it looks nicer and it a fine browser for consumers it is as dreadful and hair pulling as IE6. I am a web developer and it drives me crazy writing tons of extra code for IE7. The height problems are in every page and positioning has got me going insane. Every time someone uses that browser it is added to a percentage and all of us web developers pray people will stop using IE and drop IE to under 30% so we don't have to worry about it and use anything else such as Safari, Firefox, Opera, Flock, Netscape, Camino, anything. Just not IE.
I'm glad you enjoy it, but it's a horribly written program compared to every other browser. Just for comparison IE supports about half of all CSS while Firefox supports over 95%. I found this page looking for more hacks in height issues and that is why I am commenting.
I run a simple website tridi.com and judge how quick a browser is by the time it takes to, sign on and load, make a small change or three, preview and publish. Firefox is still much faster by 50 to 100pc. Other than that they seem even. Just don't feel safe with IE after all these years though.
You are right in one aspect but No. A standard is not what most people use. It's not like people goes, "Ohhh I want to use that "standard/function/tag" because Microsoft programed it". No, they will use what ever Microsoft put out there so Microsoft's have been creating the standards for the web over the years and that's not what most like. Or to be more specific. Microsoft have been creating their own standards and not been following the real standards. They have been able to get away with it for a long time because of their size and it's not good when a company starts to ignore the rest of the world only because they are so big and think that they don't need to care. We have something called W3C. We should follow their standards to avoid that that web falls apart.
When it comes to the memory, yes Firefox eats allot of memory but I don't think it would if there was no purpose to it. I don't think we can see clear how much memory IE consumes for real since it's a such integrated part of the OS so not even MS can't separate them anymore. You need IE to use Windows. That's why IE is so fast at startup, it's already started when Windows is booted. And finally, is memory really a problem in our computers today? Most people want at least 1 GB in their computers and some may want 2 GB even if that's not needed other then for Video. Should we not use that memory? What's wrong with that? What's the point of having allot of memory in the computer that never gets used? I don't see the pint in that at least. Applications and games have always become more complex, bigger when the computers power have increased. That's how things work. If you have a powerful computer, the software makers use the power to add functions and more. I don't see the problem with Firefox using 150MB (right now 116MB) in RAM on my computer when I have 1 GB RAM inside and a swap-file of 700 MB. Be happy instead that some programs utilize all the extra RAM you got instead of whining. There is nothing good with RAM that never get used.
And last. I want to point out that maybe Firefox since it was one of the first browsers with tabs have had to take too much blame for being a memory eater. As I wrote in a post above I installed the final version of IE7 yesterday and it works great. But... IT EATS MEMORY!!!! Now what? Isn't that just a Firefox problem? How can Microsoft make a browser that bad that eats allot of memory? Can't be true :(
I started IE7 and opened the Yahoo homepage and just that single tab consumed 40MB in RAM. it's pretty much the same as Firefox with 1 tab opened. I tested to open a total of 10 tabs and IE7 consumes 154,5 MB in RAM and going higher slowly. I think that the "memory-problem" is more of a tab-problem then anything else. Before tabs I never heard anyone complain about Firefox or any other browsers. I think people have forgot that it was not long ago we surfed the web without tabs.
Mike.
Your post just made me laugh. You are saying that Firefox feels slow and bloated? Either you lie or there is something wrong with your senses. Firefox is not slow, IE is not slow either. All the browsers today are fast. Bloated? Wow, you are saying that Firefox is bloated? That's as far as true you can come. Firefox have no E-mail apps or IRC included as Seamonkey, it comes with a clean interface, it does not come with allot of extensions installed, if you want any you have to install them yourself. It's a small download, 5 MB compared too IE7. You can uninstall it if you don't like it. You can't uninstall IE, that's what I call bloated... Firefox is as far from bloated as you can get. If something is bloated it's IE then, Firefox is not bloated.
Sept 2006:
IE7: 2.5%
IE6: 55.7%
IE5: 4%
Firefox: 27.3%
Mozilla: 2.3%
Nestscape 7/8: 0.4%
Opera 7/8/9: 1.6%
Firefox has garnered a large amount of users now.
Tough question, browser market share is reported by so many and results vary quite a bit. IIRC correctly, the last post I read on Slashdot was 18% for Firefox. Which is biased IMO - they see more than 70% Firefox browsers hitting their site and they seem to not like MS very much. Other articles I've found stated Firefox is as low as 10%.
I have a feeling Firefox usage is going to slide a few percentage points for a while, now that there is yet another browser that can compete with it.
As for people that automatically think that Sun has nothing to do with Javascript, get some facts before just blowing people off. If you did a little research, you'd find that
Javascript is a registered trademark of Sun. Netscape was the first company to license JAVA.
Brendan Eich invented Javascript while working at Netscape.
Sound a little confusing? It is.
Some urls you can check:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript
"JavaScript is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc., used under license for technology invented and implemented by Netscape."
http://inventors.about.com/od/jstartinventions/a/J...
that removes most of the effectiveness for users who, like me, use the multiple tabs from an open window.
back to firefox, i guess
Thanks for the honesty. Like I said I like FF too (I use it at home) but just wanted a fair analysis of both browsers.
Any clue what the market share percentage is for both browsers? Last I hear FF was gaining on IE.
You're quite right...FF Fan boy here! The big reason for this is that I've had my OS installed for over 2 years and I haven't yet had to re-install XP, or even revert to previous working state. I've encountered minimal spyware/malware infections since using Firefox as well.
Don't get me wrong, vulnerabilities are found in every browser. Microsoft's are just more visible due to `market share'. It just takes the Firefox crew less time to fix holes.
Firefox 2 beta: not a huge improvement versus 1.5. A little slicker UI, but that comes with the price of extra `browser bloat' and plug-in incompatibilities.
I will say this thought: IE 7 is damn fast at rendering pages.
Thanks for the info, that is good to know. Since the vulnerability has been there since IE6 (which I used), I am not too worried about it now.
While Rob may sound like he really likes IE7, he at least posts valid reason's why it's better than IE6. You just seem to be a FireFox fanboy IMO. It would seem like you should encrourage people to try IE7 since you know that FF is better, you would have nothing to lose.
But using a "so called" vulnerability that has been around since IE6 as a reason not to use IE7 seems pretty weak.
And I agree that IE7 is too integrated with Windows XP, I think thats pretty lame. I do like FF, but some of the internal sites I access will not use it, I am stuck with IE (as Rob pointed out).
How good is FF 2.0?
Gone back to IE6
IMHO, Internet Explorer no matter what version will always be vulnerable since:
1 - It's the most used browser therefore it becomes the biggest target for hacks
2 - It's too tightly integrated with Windows and in turn makes inroads to the operating system that much easier to find.
The Secunia vulnerability I posted has existed since IE 6. I only posted it due to the blatant ignorance in the artical. He must be on MS payroll.
While the IE 7 product is a HUGE improvement versus previous versions, I'm still using FireFox as my default browser. It will take a long time for me to trust MS on security and it takes them far too long to fix issues found in their products.
How does this page look? I'm running Windows 2000, so I can't try IE7, but the inability of older IEs to render CSS element positions properly was one of the biggest display bugs IMHO. If IE7 has fixed this I'll be greatly impressed.
http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/gl...
IE7 is a significant improvement over IE6. No doubt about it. But it's also still very far behind Firefox, Safari, and Opera.
The only "new" feature that IE7 brings to the table is it's handling of RSS feeds, although built-in RSS support for standard mail tools is far better than any browser-based RSS reader anyway.
Every other significant feature is copied from other browsers. Tabbed browsing? FF, Safari, and Opera have all had it for years. Chrome-based, customizable search? Same.
Lastly, I have to question the qualifications of the writer. Javascript improved because of a good relationship with Sun? You have NO idea what you're talking about. Java and javascript have very little in common other than their C-like syntax and the same first 4 letters used in their name.s
Command bar is 2.3 full;
gee, wonder if that could give anyone an idea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript
"JavaScript is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc., used under license for technology invented and implemented by Netscape."
What I want to know is whether its better than FireFox 2.0 and why?
I swear Secunia is only in business because they supposedly "exploit" vulnerabilities. They are just as bad as hackers in my book.
Don't believe what your reading here, particularly the security part.
The browser is still vulnerable. If you've installed IE 7, try this test from Secunia (one of the worlds leading security advisory services).
http://secunia.com/Internet_Explorer_Arbitrary_Con...
You need go into the toolbar option (right click on the empty space next to a tab) and checkmark "menu bar", then it will show up.
WTF happened to the Application menus (File, Edit, etc)??!! They are breaking their own windows standards.
If applications are that way on Vista, then fine.. have IE7 look that way on Vista. On windows pre Vista, make it look like a normal window.
They still are not up to par with standard compliance when compared to Mozilla browsers (netscape, firefox, et al) or Opera. For the amount of time they spent on this, you'd think they would have become completely standards compliant.
It's going to make life still tough for web programmers, because they still will need to write stylesheets, etc for IE7 and one for all the other browsers.
For a company who is supposed to be a leader, not being 100% standards compliant just makes me frustrated.
I like the tabbed browsing and will defintely use it more often.
I am sure I can customize the way everything is laid out, so I will be spending sometime with the settings.
I am glad to report that I have not been to a website yet that did not display properly in IE7.