Memoirs of a Developer

So i decided after alot of pondering (i.e. 10 minutes spent talking to a hot mug of coffee) to give the new beta a try out. Well to be pretty honest I can’t really say that i was impressed. One of the more anticipated improvements in this version was the “new” tabular strucure which Microsoft finally for down to implementing.When i first opened Internet Explorer 7 i have to admint i was impressed by how clean it looked. Unfortunatly all the enthusiasm i was feeling faded no sooner i tried using the browser’s new interface. The browser feels extremly sluggish compared to Firefox or even Internet Explorer 6.

What surprised me the most in this new revision of browser was its page rendering engine. I have always found Internet Explorer have the widest share of sites which can be rendered properly by it. This time round it seems that a good number of sites that used to render very nicely in Internet Explorer 6 and also in other browsers such as Opera and Firefox now can’t be rendered on it any more.

This however wasn’t the only surprise in store. Shortly after realising how problematic the rendering of sites was i decided to try venture in search of the reasons why it found it so hard to render them to avoid those loop holes when writing websites. I tried to connect through ftp to my webserver using the address bar to write the link. It is then that i noticed that although Internet Explorer 6 used to convert the windows to a Windows Explorer window and open the ftp from there, Internet Explorer 7 opened another Windows Explorer window altogether rather than attemp to embed one!

Admittedly this product is still in its beta phase and might be improved on quite drastically in the close future but till then i would think twice before installing it as a home browser and keep Firefox handy.

Links:

• Microsoft
• Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox
• Opera