IE7In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft are about to release Internet Explorer Version 7 to the world—I am not exactly sure when. Anyway, they are so keen on it that, soon after it becomes available, they are going to push it out as a “fix” on Patch Tuesday like the monthly security repairs.
My opinion, for what it is worth, is that the average user should resist installing this for a while to give it a chance to settle down. Many web sites will not be prepared for the changes. I have not tested it yet because I don’t want to install a pre-release version onto my only working computer, so I haven’t tested and adjusted my web site for it. I expect there are many people in the same position. Give it a few weeks for the gremlins to be worked out and see what the press is like before committing yourself. This is the same even if you use an alternative browser; a surprising amount of internal Windows relies on Internet Explorer, not the least of which is Windows Update.
Of course, if you are configured for automatic updates then you will need to turn this off and set it for notify-and-manual-install for a while so you don’t wake up one day and find it has just happened.
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IE7 was released today—and there was a security problem immediately. Heed my advice above.
In fact… why bother at all? The “must-have features” of IE7 appear to be:
– built-in search
– tabbed browsing
– anti-phishing features.
The first two are standard functions of Firefox, and have been for ages. The third is an excellent plug-in from Netcraft. And there’s the nub of it: there are plenty of other plug-ins available – for RSS readers, IRC clients, the amazing User Agent Switcher… and lots more.
Yes, I would agree from the point of view of functionality, but there are other aspects. If you are going to stick to Windows at all you do need to keep up to date with the patches and from the point of view of the rest of the OS, IE7 is just another patch. Also from the view of a web publisher, which I am other than this blog, then I need to make sure that my customers do get a decent experience of my pages. So, for that reason I will need to install it eventually. I can probably remember how IE6 works (or at least test in the office for a while because it will be a while before they convert) but this new thing is a total unknown. Many of the little tricks we use to keep pages working properly will needs to be reconsidered.