Last night, after making an article on my Slackware, i boot up my Windows and i was so curious about the new IE7 and i decided to upgrade to IE7 which i downloaded yesterday. I know this is a major upgrade, but i was so so curious, so i decided to make a new restore point first (just in case IE7 installation messed up my system) and start the IE7 installation. The installation screen was quite nice and definitely nicer than IE6 installation screen (i had tried to install IE6 on Windows 2000 few years ago). IE7 installation will check whether your Windows version is genuine or not at the beginning, so it might not worked on some pirated edition. After passing the license, it will start installing the required updates component, continued with core components, etc and finally a restart (as usuall).
After a restart, IE starts to update the start menu as usuall and personalizing some stuffs and when you have reached your desktop, you will have a new shinny IE logo on your menu (i had one on my quick launch also). Microsoft said that we could uninstall IE7 and came back to IE6, so i checked at Control Panel about this and kindda suprised when i looked at IE7's size. Only 3,34 MB? Unbelieveable. Well, i don't trust this numbers because i know it should be more than this.
Launching IE7 for the first time may cause some problems, because IE will try to look for problematic add-on and if it found one or more, it will prompt you a warning dialog. I had to disabled one of my add-on, but that's ok, as i rarely used IE also in my daily work. I prefer to use Firefox as my primary browser. Next, i tried to open my website (offline) and it looks good so far. I tried several other offline pages, since i'm not connected to the Internet while testing it, because i'm not in the office anymore and it looks good. Surprisingly, i looked at IE7's default search engine and it displayed Google as the default. In Beta/RC version, i saw that it listed MSN as the default, but in the final version, they changed it into Google.
Next, i'm quite confused about the menubar's position. It's not there anymore. I think it's gone until i pressed alt and it showed up. You do get larger area by hiding the menubar, but as the trade offs, you can't directly access the menubar, although you can use some icons on the right side to access some settings for IE.
Looking at IE's setting, they surely work very hard to update the interface. Not a big change, but with a new look, i think it's worthed. If you look at the General tab, you can see new setting, which is called Browsing History. There you can delete your browsing history as well as your private data while surfing the Internet. At IE6, will have to delete one by one, but now you can delete all of them in just a single click. Firefox does have this features long before IE adopts it.
Another new setting is the feed settings. As you probably have known, IE7 have a built in RSS feed support just like Firefox which (again) already implement this for some time before IE did it in this version. When i tried to look at one of my site which has a RSS feed, the result was very nice. I looked at local Indonesian OOo's documentation project site RSS feed (i browse the site offline, but the URL for the site is at http://project.informatix.or.id) and the result can be seen below. If you have Firefox, you can compare the result. The default RSS Schema built in on IE is nice and it can produce a nice interface.
The new phising filter option can be set in Advanced tab on the Internet Options or using the icon on the main window. You can see that IE also support XMLHTTP (you may called it AJAX) now which is turned on by default. Some action which can compromised the security setting is turned off by default which is good idea.
Another new feature in IE7 is the new quicktab (which is like ShowCase extension on Firefox). This feature can be activated if you have opened more than one tab (another new feature in IE7 which already being implemented by Opera and Firefox long long ago) and by pressing CTRL + Q.
I think my quick review is over for now and you will see more public review on some sites. Just watch for more reviews.
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