Internet Explorer Beta 2 Preview is available for download at the Microsoft web site.
Download’s fairly smooth, and they have a nice new interface.
Perhaps the biggest change is the introduction of tabbed browsing, which could very easily give them back an automatic 1% of the market share.
There are, however, some annoyances with the tabbed browsing.
When you only have one tab open, there is no way for you to close that tab, you have to have two tabs open.
To go along with that, though, there are many cool features. For instance, say you have two tabs open. If you click on a little button in the left-hand side of the tab bar you get a view of thumbnails of all of your tabs. You can then navigate to any of those windows.
Microsoft seems to have taken a lot of keys from firefox, with many of the clicks and key commands still the same. Middle-click opens a link in a new tab, and closes a tab. ctrl+tab still goes through the tabs.
One thing I like about the new IE is that there is very little space devoted to the toolbars. In the old version, a large chunk of your screen could be lost with all the stupid toolbars they put in, but in the new one by default there are only two skinny bars.
I’m not sure I like the way they have done the favorites, as getting to links with one click requires you have a sidebar open. By default, they have an icon you click which gives you a drop-down menu. You then click on your links folder and you get your links. That makes three clicks to open a bookmark instead of one, as it should be. Typing in the URL is almost faster.
I’m not a big fan of the way they did feeds in IE. You have that little orange icon from firefox in the toolbar, and clicking on it takes you to a page with the RSS feed running down. You hit a link, and you’re subscribed to the feed. To view feeds you have to click on the link to take you to your favorites, then hit a button to go to your feeds, then hit the feed you want, and it takes you to a page with the updated feeds.
Not the best way to do it.
All in all I was impressed with IE in that they finally figured out that they had to update their browser after several years, as they were a mile away from even getting to the curve, and I think they are only now turning.
They introduced some key features, but it will take power users and people they enjoy a lot of customization a lot more to leave firefox and Opera.
Here are a couple more screen shots of IE:
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Aaron 01.31.06 at 7:19 pm
Nice. Not often I discover something I didn’t know on my own blog. :)
Aaron 01.31.06 at 7:19 pm
Nice. Not often I discover something I didn’t know on my own blog. :)
Aaron Brazell 01.31.06 at 7:19 pm
Nice. Not often I discover something I didn’t know on my own blog. :)
Aaron 01.31.06 at 7:33 pm
Apparetnly, Technosailor breaks IE7. I have no idea why. But I also notice broken images in your post that are otherwiuse invisible in Firefox.
Aaron 01.31.06 at 7:33 pm
Apparetnly, Technosailor breaks IE7. I have no idea why. But I also notice broken images in your post that are otherwiuse invisible in Firefox.
Aaron Brazell 01.31.06 at 7:33 pm
Apparetnly, Technosailor breaks IE7. I have no idea why. But I also notice broken images in your post that are otherwiuse invisible in Firefox.
Aaron 01.31.06 at 7:52 pm
Who told Microsoft that they had license to reinvent the GUI? They have moved the refresh button to the right of the address bar. It’s traditional home, no matter which browser you use, has been between Forward and Stop…
I sense usability complaints.
Aaron 01.31.06 at 7:52 pm
Who told Microsoft that they had license to reinvent the GUI? They have moved the refresh button to the right of the address bar. It’s traditional home, no matter which browser you use, has been between Forward and Stop…
I sense usability complaints.
Aaron Brazell 01.31.06 at 7:52 pm
Who told Microsoft that they had license to reinvent the GUI? They have moved the refresh button to the right of the address bar. It’s traditional home, no matter which browser you use, has been between Forward and Stop…
I sense usability complaints.
Jesse 01.31.06 at 8:00 pm
Apparetnly, Technosailor breaks IE7. I have no idea why. But I also notice broken images in your post that are otherwiuse invisible in Firefox.
Yeah, it doesn’t really load properly
Who told Microsoft that they had license to reinvent the GUI? They have moved the refresh button to the right of the address bar. It’s traditional home, no matter which browser you use, has been between Forward and Stop…
I sense usability complaints.
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it
Jesse 01.31.06 at 8:00 pm
Apparetnly, Technosailor breaks IE7. I have no idea why. But I also notice broken images in your post that are otherwiuse invisible in Firefox.
Yeah, it doesn’t really load properly
Who told Microsoft that they had license to reinvent the GUI? They have moved the refresh button to the right of the address bar. It’s traditional home, no matter which browser you use, has been between Forward and Stop…
I sense usability complaints.
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it
Jesse 01.31.06 at 8:00 pm
Apparetnly, Technosailor breaks IE7. I have no idea why. But I also notice broken images in your post that are otherwiuse invisible in Firefox.
Yeah, it doesn’t really load properly
Who told Microsoft that they had license to reinvent the GUI? They have moved the refresh button to the right of the address bar. It’s traditional home, no matter which browser you use, has been between Forward and Stop…
I sense usability complaints.
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it
Aaron Brazell 01.31.06 at 8:17 pm
I feel a post brewing. From a development point of view there’s a few things…
1. height:100% only renders 100% of the viewable area. Int he case of Technosailor, everything is jammed into a global div called “page”. The CSS for #page
iswas:#page { height:100%; }In IE7, that renders only in the viewable area, so as soon as you pull areas of the screen up that were not viewable on the initial page load, the CSS rendering breaks.
Still finding other differences. The trick will be finding a CSS hack that renders IE6 content while leaving IE7 content alone.
Aaron 01.31.06 at 8:17 pm
I feel a post brewing. From a development point of view there’s a few things…
1. height:100% only renders 100% of the viewable area. Int he case of Technosailor, everything is jammed into a global div called “page”. The CSS for #page <strike>is</strike>was:
#page { height:100%; }In IE7, that renders only in the viewable area, so as soon as you pull areas of the screen up that were not viewable on the initial page load, the CSS rendering breaks.
Still finding other differences. The trick will be finding a CSS hack that renders IE6 content while leaving IE7 content alone.
Aaron 01.31.06 at 8:17 pm
I feel a post brewing. From a development point of view there’s a few things…
1. height:100% only renders 100% of the viewable area. Int he case of Technosailor, everything is jammed into a global div called “page”. The CSS for #page <strike>is</strike>was:
#page { height:100%; }In IE7, that renders only in the viewable area, so as soon as you pull areas of the screen up that were not viewable on the initial page load, the CSS rendering breaks.
Still finding other differences. The trick will be finding a CSS hack that renders IE6 content while leaving IE7 content alone.
Jesse 01.31.06 at 9:06 pm
yeah, definitely some issues they need to get to.
This is, after all, still fairly early beta, but they still have a lot of improvements to get to
I’m betting they’ll release a version soon with a bunch of problems, and then a few months later they’ll release one with a bunch of upgrades. just a guess, but it’s how Microsoft does things
Jesse 01.31.06 at 9:06 pm
yeah, definitely some issues they need to get to.
This is, after all, still fairly early beta, but they still have a lot of improvements to get to
I’m betting they’ll release a version soon with a bunch of problems, and then a few months later they’ll release one with a bunch of upgrades. just a guess, but it’s how Microsoft does things
Jesse 01.31.06 at 9:06 pm
yeah, definitely some issues they need to get to.
This is, after all, still fairly early beta, but they still have a lot of improvements to get to
I’m betting they’ll release a version soon with a bunch of problems, and then a few months later they’ll release one with a bunch of upgrades. just a guess, but it’s how Microsoft does things
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