Hands-on Review: Internet Explorer 7

I've been using various betas of Internet Explorer 7 for a few weeks now and have formed an opinion or two. Is IE7 right for you? Here are a handful of thoughts based on my experience with the new browser. Haven't seen it yet? You can download a Yahoo! version here.

What I Like

• Anti-Phishing Alerts - This is going to be a huge help to millions of IE users who can't tell the difference between paypal.com and paypa1.com. IE7 looks up every site you visit to see if it's a phishing risk, and so far it's correctly identified everything I've managed to throw at it as a scam site. There are allegedly other security improvements under the hood, too, but these are tough to analyze objectively. The notoriously evil ActiveX has largely been nerfed, however.
• Printing Repaired - Half the time, printing a web page with IE6 meant losing a few words off the right side of the page. That's fixed in IE7, and it now works most of the time.
• Search Without a Toolbar - A little window in the top right corner lets you search your favorite search engine without having to install a toolbar or visit a search site's home page. It's convenient.
• Zoomin' - A magnifier in the bottom left of the screen lets you quick-click among 100% (normal), 125%, and 150% magnification. It's easier than the old "text size" menu and much faster. Use the drag-down to get up to 400% magnification. Yow! It's perfect for those clowns who insist on using birdseed type on a black background.
• Better Cleanup System - IE6 had a cumbersome method for deleting your browsing history, cookies, temp files, and the like. Now this has been simplified with a minimal-click method: Tools > Delete Browsing History... > OK. Much quicker and more thorough.

Ambivalent

• Tabbed Browsing - I don't really use tabbed browsing (one of the "killer features" of Firefox) and I just don't really like it that much. I prefer navigating multiple browser windows with the taskbar instead of at the top of the screen (and prefer having multiple windows side by side instead of stacked atop each other), but I can certainly see the value in having a method to open multiple web pages at once. Your mileage may vary on this one. The IE7 tabbed browsing does work fine, if that's your scene, but Firefox or Opera fans won't be missing much with IE's version.
• Integrated RSS Reader - It also works well enough, but it's pretty heinously ugly. I doubt many RSS users will switch to this beast.

What I Don't Like

• Nagging Rendering Problems - Easily the issue which will keep me from upgrading all my machines for awhile. Some pages (nothing terribly complex) look completely wrong in IE7, even those that look just fine in IE6. There's simply no reason for this to happen, and Microsoft's annoying habit of pushing its own versions of web features instead of adhering to standards are the root cause. There's not much you can do aside from a) wait for Microsoft to fix its code to handle these sites or b) wait for the sites to change their code to adapt to IE7. Either way, I don't want to get stuck in the middle of that.
• Mixed-Up Interface - It's great that Microsoft has streamlined the browser a bit by removing some unneeded icons, but losing the text menu bar is a real pain, and moving the favorites menu to the far left has taken some real getting used to. The text menu is of course still there. You just push the Alt button to bring it up... which you have to do all the time in order to change Internet Options, run Windows Update, save web pages, or do just about anything else, though you can do some of these things with a menu icon. Why not just leave the menu bar there and at the top of the screen where we expect it to be? (Instead, the address bar is now at the top and the text menu appears below that. Then toolbars, then the quick-launch icons below that.) You can make the text menu sticky, but you can't move it to the top of the page.

Overall, if you're an IE6 user, it's worth giving IE7 a shot. You might like it, you might not. But IE7's security features are definitely a big plus (IE6 is notoriously awful in this regard, but it remains to be seen if IE7 will have the same problems). If you don't encounter page-rendering problems on your favorite sites, you might want to hang on to it. If you don't like it, uninstall instructions are below. However, Firefox users, especially those using the new Firefox 2.0 (reviewed here), aren't going to be impressed.

Don't want IE7 yet? Run this quick IE7 blocking program to keep it from auto-installing when Microsoft releases it. (Update: The final version of IE7 was just released on October 18. Download it here, or download the Yahoo! version.)

Don't like IE7? Many many people have written asking how they can get rid of it. It's easy: Just go to Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs. Pick Windows Internet Explorer 7 from the list and uninstall it. (They trick you by throwing that "Windows" in there.) Reboot, and IE6 will have returned exactly the way it was before. I've tried going back and forth between IE6 and IE7 multiple times and haven't had a problem with it.