Archive for the ‘Browsers’ Category
IE 7 Coming Soon – Part 1
According to the IE 7 blog site the final release of Internet Explorer 7 is coming this month. I’ve been using the Release Candidate for a while and its nice but…as usability expert and publisher of “Don’t Make me Think” Steve Krug says, “Conventions are your friend” and unfortunately the IE7 team have moved away from some browser conventions which will probably confuse and piss people off a bit. That said I think there are enough improvements to balance the frustration.
The good bits
- Tabbed browsing – A nice feature (Firefoxies et al have had this for a long time) which allows you to open multiple browser windows in a single instance of the browser. I always force a new window (shift + click) with new links especially from a set of search results which makes it easier to come back to the original information. I discovered today that (CTRL + click) does the same things with the tabs….nice.
- Quick Tabs – At the left most side of the tabs is a quick tab button that gives a very cool snapshot of all open windows, kind of like the ALT+TAB in XP but much larger.
The not so good bits
- Padlock moved – The SSL padlock logo is my security blanket when I have a credit card in hand and its been moved from the bottom right up next to the URL bar. I guess this reflects it importance but that location is a bit of convention going back to early browser days.
- File, Edit, View menu gonski – This is a Vistarism and its going to take some getting used to. I struggled to enable it (right click the chrome and select menu bar) and it no longer sits at the top of the screen.
- Refresh and Stop – I use these often and they are now next to the URL bar and they are small. The URL cannot be easily resized like it used to be so I am doing mouse marathons to get to it.
I’m only using a Release Candidate so hopefully Microsoft get a lot of feedback and make some changes but I’m not counting on it. It reminds me of the move to XP. I initially hated the new start menu interface and loaded the classic start menu but I caved soon after.
