Jeff's Lunchbreak: Internet Explorer 7 Sucks

The other day I took the plunge and upgraded to the latest version of Internet Explorer, IE7. Less than 24 hours later, it was deleted off my computer.

I didn't research it much before I installed it. I'd read a few things about it, how it had better printing support, some cool new features, and was supposedly more secure than IE6. I figured I'd install it for the extra security, and that I probably wouldn't notice that much difference in actually using it. Boy was I wrong. Microsoft completely overhauled the user interface (UI), and they didn't do a good job at it at all.

For a good overview of how Microsoft changed the interface, read this review from a blog called Greg's Head.

For me personally, I like to have all the major controls near the top left of the window. It just makes sense to me, since that's the way computer menus have been organized ever since I started using them, and the way they're organized in most other programs. You just look up to the top left corner, and you can easily find whatever function you're looking for. It works; it's standard; so why go messing around with it? I've read other people who like their internet browsers organized a bit differently, putting everything in as few of lines as possible so that they can have more screen space for the actual pages they're looking at. But IE7 accomplishes neither of these - important functions are scattered helter skelter over the top of the window, and the menus take up more space than people were able to accomplish in IE6, and worst of all, IE7 doesn't let you move the menus around to customize them the way you want, so you're stuck with having it in the haphazard design that Microsoft came up with.

Now, you could say I'm just bitching. But really, that's the whole point of Internet browsers. It's easy enough to look up a web page and display it on a computer, so making the navigation easy on the user, especially considering how much navigation most people do when browsing the Internet, is about the most imporant consideration in Internet broswers.

Aside from the UI, IE7 crashed a lot more than IE6. IE6 crashes maybe once a week on me - not very often. In the less than 24 hours that I used IE7, it crashed on me at least half a dozen times. And, it was slower to load than IE6 was.

As far as tabbed browsing, well, that never really did much for me. I'd tried it in Firefox before, but I just don't see the point, at least for the way I use my computer. I've got a task bar at the bottom of the screen already. Every document, application, and folder I have open is available with a quick scan and 1 click of the mouse. Using tabbed browsing means a different location I have to scan, and when switching between applications, 2 mouse clicks to get back to web pages I'd been looking at (1 click to switch to the browser, 1 click to switch to the appropriate tab) (Oh yeah, I disabled that feature in XP that automatically groups similar taskbar items, for the same reason). I just don't understand why tabbed browsing is supposed to be so great.

Anyway, I'm back to using IE6, because it's familiar. I may start playing around with Firefox a little more, though, to start getting used to it.