Traitor!
Last night I finally got around to installing IE7 after reading the release candidate had gone public. A little late to the game, but blah, blah, blah, some excuse goes here…
I’ve been following the improvements to the CSS and rendering engine fairly closely, but I hadn’t really expected the overall product to kick ass. I love Firefox. Really. Even have the t-shirt. I’m now considering leaving it swimming in the gutter and running off with IE7.
From an initial look it seems to be leagues ahead of the last release. It provides two different zoom modes – the usual text size increase, but also an Opera style full page zoom. I think my favourite feature is the tab overview page which displays a thumbnail view of each tab that updates in realtime as the pages change.
It seems like the whole attitude towards development of the product has changed over the past year or so, and the commitment to better support of the CSS standard is really encouraging. All of the sites that I’ve developed just work straight off, because the browser is moving closer to the standard that the sites validate to. That is actually quite a significant achievement for a major new browser release.
I think I was expecting some level of pain with a new flavour of browser on the block, but so far everything looks peachy. Give it a go and see what you think (well… windows users). I’ll decide whether or not to stab Firefox in the back over the next few days.
Everytime you praise IE7, somewhere out there, a fox cub dies. I hope you’re happy with yourself, Francis.
Comment by Grace, August 25, 2006 @ 7:20 am
it’s not such much the rendering, the safety, the open sourceness that keep me with Firefox.
It’s adblock and scriptblock.
Until plugins for IE become as easy to write as those for Firefox it will, I’m afraid, be a secondary browser for me.
That and the rendering bug I discovered with inherited margins still isn’t fixed, hehe
Comment by barryd, August 25, 2006 @ 8:52 am
Damn, hadn’t really thought about all the shiny plugins that I rely on in FF. Grr.
They seem to be moving in that direction but I wouldn’t imagine there will be the same breadth of material available for a while.
Comment by Oli, August 25, 2006 @ 9:12 am