Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

IE7 Beta 1: The Annoyances

Posted in Browsers, Computers & Technology, Google, Microsoft, Spread IE by Elliott Back on July 30th, 2005.

There are few things that annoy me about IE 7.00.5112. First off, it’s not all that great. I just don’t feel overwhelmed when I run it, you know? I definitely had high expectation when I downloaded it, but those are all in vain. Instead, I have the following Internet Explorer 7 gripes:

1) The base color of the tabs is different than the rest of the application’s base color:

ie-7-bad-base-color

2) The tabs bar has an extra tab nubbin to open a new tab:

ie-7-tab-nubbin

3) The refresh button has been placed seemingly randomly:

ie-7-weird-refresh-button

4) The standard windows UI layout of putting the file menu at the top has been broken. The file menu is now underneath the tabs:

ie-7-bad-file-menu

5) The phishing filter makes no attempt to prevent me from reporting Microsoft.com:

Phishing Filter Feedback: Confirmation
Thank you for reporting www.microsoft.com/ as a suspected phishing site. Your feedback is important and helps us to better protect customers from phishing.

You can read more about their laughable filter here: msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/IETechCol/dnwebgen/MSPhishingFilterWP.asp

6) The phishing filter thinks submitting user information via POST is bad:

ie-7-phishing-filter-post

7) Internet Explorer will close when you hit close, no matter how many tabs you have open. You can even watch it kill the tabs one by one on a slower machine:

ie-7-kills-lots-of-tabs

8) The search is automatically Google. Why doesn’t the IE Team promote MSN? The tagline here is “Microsoft loves Google:”

ie-7-microsoft-loves-google

9) There is a lot of wasted space on the links bar. For some reason, every link appears to have a min-width setting that makes them overly wide. So, the links bar that was half empty before in IE6 is now running off the screen:

ie-7-wasted-links-bar-space

For some other interesting takes on IE7, you can read Is Internet Explorer 7 blocking Google?, IE7 CSS Updates, Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 Tips & Tricks, and The Real Reason Microsoft Won’t Support CSS2 in IE7.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 30th, 2005 at 10:53 am and is tagged with updates internet explorer, feedback confirmation, support css2, internet explorer 7 beta 1, high expectation, internet explorer 7 beta, reason microsoft, phishing filter, google, links bar, gripes, annoyances, real reason, ie 7, tagline, user information, tabs, explorer 7 beta, microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

Viewing 36 Comments

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    Good stuff. =)
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    Congratulations, you have been featured on the Technology Website, BetaDot.
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    Thanks Betadot, Xerocool!
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    I hadn't seen the new tab button on the default XP theme. Doesn't look as nice as it does on non-Luna themes.

    Nice post btw :)
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    I amthe manager for IE's user interface development team, so I read this post with interest. I wanted to give some commentary on it.

    The IE7 UI isn't final; only the basic "bones" of the UI are there. Fit and finish issues like the tab color are known issues to fix fo the Beta 2. Beta 1 is mostly about appcompat and getting the core changes into people's hands and getting feedback on it.

    We're getting lots of feedback against the combined stop/go/refresh as well as the movement of the menu bar. It's that kind of feedback that helps us decide what the final UI should be.

    We're not going to stop anybody from reporting a site they think is suspicious, even if it's www.microsoft.com. Why would we?

    An an upgrade install, IE7 will respect your current search provider. If you had Google in IE6, then it's Google in IE7. We didn't just stomp your setting to MSN. Now, if you didn't have Google as your search provider in IE6, and now it is Google, then that would be a bug.
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    Thanks Bruce. I'm glad to hear that the interface is a rough mockup in this first beta, and that there's much more to come. So, I await beta 2 with heightened interest!

    However, I think that the phishing intelligence should be a little bit smarter and authoritative. For example, you could keep track of the authority of your users, so that when a non-authoritative user tries to mark a site with lots of good karma as a phishing site, they receive a negative message like "This site is a known good site, and you have been known to misclassify phishing sites in the past. Marking this as bad when it is actually good will hurt your relationship with the phishing filter--are you sure you want to do this?" Something like that would be useful, IMO.

    Also, I really think IE7 should stomp on your search provider... all new IE7 searches should be through MSN. It's a new product, changing it requires one click, so why not default it?
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    "Also, I really think IE7 should stomp on your search providerÂ… all new IE7 searches should be through MSN. It's a new product, changing it requires one click, so why not default it?"

    Why on earth would you think that? The user chose these preferences for a reason. Now, a new version of the same product is supposed to clobber them? How does that help the user?

    I'd be more interested in hearing if IE7 fixes any of these bugs, considering I'm wrestling with two of them at the moment.
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    Check out this post by the IE team. Apparently they fixed the following bugs:

    Peekaboo bug
    Guillotine bug
    Duplicate Character bug
    Border Chaos
    No Scroll bug
    3 Pixel Text Jog
    Magic Creeping Text bug
    Bottom Margin bug on Hover
    Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
    IE/Win Line-height bug
    Double Float Margin Bug
    Quirky Percentages in IE
    Duplicate indent
    Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
    1 px border style
    Disappearing List-background
    Fix width:auto

    They also support full CSS1 and some CSS2:

    CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
    CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
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    Given that IE has many ridiculous rendering, parsing, and layout bugs that have gone unfixed for years, doesn't support CSS 1.0 (when the W3C is now working on CSS3), has serious security flaws, doesn't support PNG transparency, is widely exploited by malicious software, and was recommended against by the US Government, could you explain why you are trying to "Spread IE"? You seem most enthusiastic about IE7 catching up to features browsers like Opera, Galeon, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Safari have had for years. All of this begs the question: "Why use IE?"

    Don't get me wrong--I'm excited about IE7 too, because I want to reduce the number of brain-damaged hacks in my code to deal with it's peculiar interpretations of web standards. It just boggles my mind that someone who has tried a different browser would find a compelling reason to switch back, outside of sites that require ActiveX.
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    Just a quick note that the last IE7 and Security article by Dean Edwards you linked has nothing to do with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 beta. It's for Dean's existing-versions-of-IE-fixing JavaScript IE7.
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    Did you run out of things to bitch about so you had to nitpick? You come off as a whiny little bitch with nothing better to do than complain about what a decent development team is doing.
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    Oh--thanks Shaun. I thought it looked more cryptic than usual, but I hadn't associated the IE7 jscript project with "Dean Edwards" yet, so I assumed it was about the new IE.
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    There was a time that I actually thought I.E was a good browser now it`s so full of holes even dear Liza has switched to Firefox! To add to the two finger salute Microsoft is currently snubbing previous versions so much for customer loyalty! No other browser can afford to treat its customers so shabbily but I`m sure they`ll be making a version that works in Linux though! Trouble is Firefox got there first and are making a better product. Memo to Microsoft: Smaller is better, quicker and simpler! is there anyone out there listening though?
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    I've always been a fan of IE for one reason, everyone tests in IE, and therefore everything works in IE. I've been a great proponent of using IE to pay careless web authors the courtesy of viewing their pages as they were intended. Recently I've been giving firefox a try. I have to say, I'm really enjoying it, however, I find it to be a very buggy browser, especially in regard to context menus and multiple monitors. Bugzilla is full of posts about this kind of stuff. The fact that many websites still lack total firefox support isn't helping things either. Still, I'm willing to give firefox (and web designers) a little time to fully mature.

    In testing IE7, it was pretty obvious that Microsoft means to make a firefox-like browser, but without being too obvious about it. I think they're trying to bring just enough innovation to the table (in this phishing filter *cough*scare tactic*cough*) to keep hold of their massive market share of msn-browsing, msn-messenger-using, hotmail-loving, you-just-won-an-ipod-banner-clicking technophobes that'll use anything that microsoft puts in front of'em.

    I really don't mind any of the annoyances you pointed out so far, except for the obvious lack of a multiple tabs closure warning (it doesn't have to be an alert like firefox, how about a little menu that says "close this tab / close all tabs" what originates from the top-right corner?) The refresh/go/stop button takes a little getting used to, and doesn't always turn into the go button when it should, but I don't suspect it really matters, it'll be gone by beta 2.

    I did notice that IE7 is pretty annoying for local web page testing. When you open a local web page with IE7 it goes into "my computer" mode which is essentially the same, except (one thing I've noticed is) whenever an anchor href is clicked it refreshes the page before going to that anchor... thus I can't test certain javascripts locally. Also, if I paste a local file path into an IE7 window that's in the "internet" mode, instead of that window switching to "my computer" mode, it opens the file in a new browser window (default browser, mine happens to be firefox currently.) Annoying.

    I would really love to see IE7 be the best browser in town, if for no other reason, to take some of the wind out of these hippies sails with their holier-than-thou "I use firefox cuz micro$oft is a CORPORATION... I like open-source because it promotes world peace" crap. I swear people think that bill gates is up in a tower in a thunderstorm somewhere stroking a cat and plotting world domination.

    P.S. I agree, don't promote other search engines. Just let them make their own plugins for the quick search box, like firefox. Kudos on the PNG support... it's about freaking time! Now it'll only be like 5 more years before enough people have upgraded that I can add alpha-channel PNG images to my pages without some javascript nonsense to back it up. How about adding it to IE6 via windows update?

    P.P.S. Not that I'm advocating priated windows copies or anything, but restricting IE7 to only WGA authorized systems isn't the way to repress the spread of firefox. Sorry for the excessively long post, Elliott.
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    To anyone who read my previous post, it's probably pretty obvious that the thing I forgot to consider is that if I am testing things locally using a local web server, like apache, that I wouldn't have the problem with the href="#object" references. ( Like http://localhost/page.htm ) I'm not sure why that never occurred to me. Still, it's worth mentioning that this differs from IE6. The whole thing about launching a new window when you switch between internet and local zones seems like an effort (possibly court ordered) to separate Internet Explorer from the rest of Windows. I'm sure it will all become clearer to me after I give Vista 5112 a whirl.
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    Hey Elliott ... I am new here, so please forgive me if I am a little "newbie-ish".

    I was completely frustrated with the links bar myself ... most of my "Links Bar Titles" in IE6 were 2, 3 or 4 charachters so I can cram more into a 1600x1200 screen.

    Anyway ... I stumbled across something very interesting ... change the names of ALL of your links to 3 or 4 charachters and VOILA! They magically all shrink to the space of the longest name ... for example if most of your link bar names are 4 charachters but one is 9 charchters, ALL names will take up a space equal to 9. If some of your names are 2 or 3 with one at 4, they will ALL be 4 ... etc.

    It worked for me ... hopefully it works for others out there, because I know many are frustrated by this same problem.
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    that seems really annoying to me. Well, it was still in Beta. so hope there would be wuick changes for IE7.
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    you fucking piece of shit! i came to this site searching how to uninstall that spam bullshit and all you give me is more shit that everyone knows. i'll fucking piss on your grave

    Your dead father.
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    I think that the above is the weirdest comment on my blog network yet. Really.
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    I agree for the most part, I personally love that extra nub to open a new tab
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    I have also noticed a few problems with the beta. These are outlined as I have experienced them.

    1. The popup blocker cannot be turned off it continues to still block popups after it is suppose to be turned off.

    2. You cannot choose to instal an ActiveX control by right clicking the information bar.

    3. Some websites freeze and will never become unfrozen and you will have to end the process on iexplorer.exe in order to close it.

    4. I too have a complaint about the menu being place below the tab.

    5. Overall it is an ugly piece of software. I can probably design a better browser in a month.

    6. Finally it blocks the script that allows a browse dialog to be shown when you want ot upload a pic from your computer for instance.


    Hopefully all these problems are fixed in a later beta or in the final version. It is very buggy and cannot be used as a primary browser at all. Very Unstable.
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