Hugh Winkler holding forth on computing and the Web

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

IE7 Quick Take

Curious about IE7, I installed the beta preview.

The browser itself looks OK. Basically it's Firefox look and feel. Tabs. Wow. I'm interested in exploring the RSS/Atom support but did not get the chance to exercise much. They do have a little "subscribe" icon that looks just like Firefox's. It makes you wonder: If it takes the equivalent of a space program to catch up to dinky little Firefox and feed aggregators, how is MS going to keep up with whatever comes next? They'll be starting out a nose behind. The little guys will blazing new continents before MS ships Vista.

About ten hours later, I had to do System Restore to get back to IE6. Principally, that's because I was working on a project using somewhat unfamiliar tools ( Nullsoft Installer and VS 2003) and needing the online help a lot. After installing IE7, almost no pages were visible in the Nullsfoft CHM, and all the pages lost their styling in VS online help.

Demonstrating the tightly coupled Microsoft world: Install IE7 and you'll be "upgrading" several other products that used to work just fine.

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