Internet Explorer 7 Hits RC1 Milestone
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Internet Explorer (IE) 7 is almost soup. Microsoft is releasing for public download on August 24 a new test build of its browser, the near-final Release Candidate (RC) 1 milestone.
RC1 may or may not be the final public test build of IE 7, officials said, depending on tester feedback.
Microsoft has said to expect the final version of its standalone browser to be available in the fourth calendar quarter of 2006. Microsoft is planning to push IE 7 out to users via its Automatic Update software-distribution mechanism that is used to deliver security patches to Windows users. Microsoft is providing a blocking tool for corporate users who do not want the new browser delivered this way. Microsoft also plans to post the final IE 7 bits on its download site, officials have said. IE 7 RC1 includes primarily under-the-cover tweaks in the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and performance/reliability arenas, said Margaret Cobb, IE group product manager. "We've also worked on the fit and finish, and tightened site rendering for our developers," Cobb said. Microsoft also has added, based on tester feedback, a new automatic uninstall feature to the RC1 build, she said. In order to install previous test builds of the browser, users had to first uninstall their current versions and then download the new bits. With the RC1 release, an automatic uninstall of previous IE 7 test builds will be part of the new installation process. Microsoft has added French and Spanish support, as of IE 7 RC1, to its list of supported languages, Cobb said. Microsoft has no plans to further reduce the number of security-related pop-ups that are part of the new IE 7, Cobb said. A number of Vista testers have complained that Microsoft is including too many security-related pop-ups with Vista and the version of IE that is integrated into Microsoft's next-generation operating system. On August 22, the IE team posted to the IE Team Blog a list of more than 200 CSS-related changes and fixes that Microsoft has made in IE 7 in order to make the browser more CSS-standards-compliant. Microsoft has been under fire for years for not complying with CSS standards. Even though IE 7 will not be fully CSS 2.1-compliant, as Microsoft officials themselves have acknowledged, the company has made improvements in the standards-compliancy space that have won over some public skeptics. With the IE 7 RC1 build, Microsoft made several CSS-specific changes, at customers' requests, Cobb said. Among these are changes in the way IE 7 deals with minimum/maximum build-image height and white spaces. Microsoft also has come under fire this week for the way it is support International Domain Names (IDNs) with IE 7. Gervase Markham, a programmer with the Mozilla Foundation, said publicly that IE 7's IDN handling will have a "serious detrimental effect on IDN take-up." Microsoft believes it is going the right route in the way it is handling IDN names -- in terms of improving IE 7's resistance to phishing and spoofing -- Cobb said, and has no plans to change the way IE 7 displays code. |
Comments (1)
To be applauded are IE7's better security features, better printing support (at last) and much-improved Web design standards compliance (CSS, etc).Things are not as rosy on the user interface side of things. Yes, there are a few nice user interface features such as Quick Tabs. However, I reckon that its GUI is a weak if not amateurish effort.The tailorabiity is much more limited than with IE6. You can't move things around as much to suits your modus operandi, the address bar is fixed so you can't view long URLs, the Menu system is very clumsy and indirect, you can't have multi-row tabs no place the tabs at the bottom of the window to reduce clutter, and more limitations than there's space here to cover. All these are important for more than occasional browser usage. Thank goodness there are some "front ends" out there that can be used to overcome IE7's limitations: my personal favorite is AVANT BROWSER, which does everything that IE7 lacks and more! Not to mention Firefox of course, which -- with its enormous richness and tailorability of extensions -- already provides a much better user experience than IE7. For a development organization with such vast resources, in terms of tailorability and feature set Microsoft has come up with a disappointingly weak product.Apart from the above general considerations, there's one small but important omission in IE7 really irks me... Unlike in IE6, in IE7 you can no longer use the "key binding" of Ctrl+Mousewheel to increase/decrease text size. Not only is this annoying in IE7 itself, but it's a showstopper for quite a few products that use IE as an embedded rendering engine: the likes of Lotus Notes, Eudora e-mail client, and Microsoft's own Management Console (MMC) in Windows XP to name just a few. Such products don't have a file menu for altering text size, so once you install IE7 you're stuck with fixed-size text. You can't just press the Ctrl key and scroll you mouse wheel any longer. What an annoyance: those of us with high-resolution monitors and/or less-than-perfect eyesight are going to suffer because of this oversight!Well, actually it's not an oversight at all, it's a deliberate design decision by some Microsoft people who really should have known better. For a brief time, in IE7 Beta 2 (only), you could use the key binding Ctrl+Shift+Mousewheel to accomplish the desired text resizing. But then they took this capability away in IE7 Beta3; they assigned this key binding to horizontal panning. Fair enough, they did this to complement the use of Ctrl+Mousewheel for page zooming [which changes the ENTIRE page contents, images and everything else, not just the text].But why on earth didn't these wunderkinder make the small effort assign some other key binding to change text size (say, Alt+Mousewheel or something similar). It would have been a trivial exercise for them.I started a mini-campaign, via some entries in various Microsoft IE blogs and the IE Feedback site, to get them to do something along these lines, but to no effect. Unfortunately they were in a "We know what's best for you" mode, and they sadly neglected to do this simple thing. Oh well, at least I tried ...Such a weak user interface effort from a highly talented crew is extremely surprising, when you take into account what has been available with other browsers for a year or two.So for me, it's Avant Browser (most of the time) plus Firefox (the rest of the time) to the rescue. At this stage, I can see myself using the native IE7 interface occasionally so deficient is it, more's the pity.Tony AustinAsia/Pacific Computer Servicesasiapac.com.au -or- notestracker.com
Posted by Tony Austin | August 24, 2006 11:29 PM