IE7 Musings

Posted Mon, Nov 13 2006 21:37 by bill
 
I've been using IE7 almost from the day it was released, and for the most part it's been good.  The UI took a little to get use to, but nothing requiring me to look up the help file (phew)<g>  Performance seems good, and tabbed browsing can be handy.  But there's a few improvements I would like to see:
 
  1. Search in the current page.  Why bring up an extra dialogue window, instead surface the forward and next buttons on the search in the menu bar.
  2. Allow customisation of ALL the menu bar area's.  At present you can't move that "Home"… "Tools" bar, and I want to.  It just feels wrong where it is, I would prefer to have my Links menu bar there.  I definitely want to move my Links menu bar from having to sit in-between the address bar and the tabs.  At present it's "instance (page specific)", "static", then "page specific".  Let me choose what feels comfortable there for me
  3. Allow me more flexibility when opening new tabs.  I have links open in new tabs without switching to that tab, but sometimes I would like to switch to that tab. It'd be nice if the context menu allowed a "go to" or another way to let me choose
  4. Give me greater flexibility in security without a zillion annoying prompts.  I don't want to be prompted to allow activex controls all the time (I only allow a set of admin approved ones by default), yet I do want an easy way to let a given site use other activex. At present I have to either submit to being always prompted or change the zone for a site.  Very much an all or not at all kind of feeling.  I'd much rather an un-obtrusive icon in the status bar I can right click on, see what activeX a page has requested, and check which ones I want to allow, a and/or allow all for on a page by page basis.
  5. Similar to 4, by this time on privacy.  I'm tired of the ridiculous number of cookies sites want to store on my machine.  But I want to allow other sites to add cookies, yet I don't want to be prompted. It'd be nice if this was easy to change per site when a page loads
  6. Adding a site to a different zone shouldn't require so many clicks as it does today
  7. It'd be nice if that notification area between the tabs and the actual page could be hidden by default if I have the status bar displayed, instead showing up as an icon in the status bar.
Other than that everything seems to work, possibly better and faster than previous versions.  I don’t think the user is in control yet, but hopefully soon :)
 
 
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Comments

# re: IE7 Musings

Monday, November 13, 2006 7:34 AM by Philip Stevens

That is quite a list for a product that only comes around once every decade for features, well OK maybe more often than that... I totally agree on the search feature, that is terrible they are still doing that.  At first I thought it was faster, but as of late I'm almost thinking it is slower, and why does opening a new tab take a second or more (at least on my box it does).  

One downfall of tabbed browsing I discovered yesterday was that when it crashes, it crashes them all... I was looking at some real estate and opening up a few links in new tabs (which btw, also seems to take a second or more before I regain control of the current tab, also annoying) and suddenly IE just disappeared, not one tab worth, but all of them.  My other browser windows were of course fine.  I'm not a firefox fan simply because I don't like the way some pages get rendered, but I have to say, I'm not an IE fan either.  All I'm trying to do is view webpages on the internet, seems like that experience should have been perfected after so long.