Seven Things To Do When IE7 Is Released

Inter­net Explorer Upgrade:

Some­day soon, Microsoft is going to release Inter­net Explorer 7, their first major browser upgrade in five years. Those in the inter­net busi­ness have antic­i­pated it for a while now, dis­cussing and scru­ti­niz­ing it. If you don’t fol­low the lat­est inter­net events, you may won­der what I’m talk­ing about.

Back­ground:

Inter­net Explorer (IE) is the browser with the most mar­ket share, about 94% in mid-​2004 and slowly descend­ing to about 80% or less today. More infor­ma­tion on browser trends and sta­tis­tics is avail­able. IE’s strong show­ing is mainly due to default instal­la­tion on every new Win­dows PC, and being the default browser for the AOL ser­vice.

“…the IE ren­der­ing engine runs pretty rough in spots”

How­ever, web design­ers and devel­op­ers have long objected that it dis­plays web pages incor­rectly, in con­flict with the W3C spec­i­fi­ca­tions. In other words, the IE ren­der­ing engine runs pretty rough in spots, so bad that there’s almost a cot­tage indus­try pro­duc­ing and doc­u­ment­ing tech­niques for fix­ing or “patch­ing” these problems.

The web indus­try is so inter­ested in IE7 that there are detailed dis­cus­sions about the small­est details, includ­ing whether a par­tic­u­lar bug will be fixed, exactly how IE7 will be released, etc.

The good news is that the IE7 ren­der­ing engine fixes all kinds of bugs and other things, mak­ing it quite a capa­ble browser on par with its competition:

Inter­net Explorer 7 … includes improve­ments in per­for­mance, sta­bil­ity, secu­rity, and appli­ca­tion com­pat­i­bil­ity. Microsoft has also made enhance­ments to the fit and fin­ish of the user inter­face, com­pleted CSS plat­form changes, added lan­guage support, ….

On the other hand, many peo­ple argue that catch­ing up is insuf­fi­cient.

Seven Things To Do:

So, if you use Inter­net Explorer, here is a list of things to do when IE7 is released:

1. Do noth­ing. (or Install IE7.)
2. Check out the new inter­face.
3. Pro­ceed with cau­tion.
4. Enjoy new fea­tures.
5. Learn old fea­tures.
6. Surf with secu­rity.
7. Say good­bye to IE6.

1. Do noth­ing. If your oper­at­ing sys­tem is Win­dows XP, and you sub­scribe to the auto­matic updates fea­ture, IE7 will be dis­trib­uted as a “high-​priority update”. This means that when the final ver­sion is released later this year, it may auto­mat­i­cally down­load and upgrade itself for you.

The rea­son it’s being dis­trib­uted auto­mat­i­cally is the added secu­rity improve­ments, and it will hope­fully improve your inter­net expe­ri­ence greatly.

If your PC doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally install it, let’s edit that first step:

1. *Install IE7 Don’t hes­i­tate. Don’t even think about it. Just do it.

2. Check out the new inter­face. IE7 sports a whole new look and feel. The inter­face is pret­tied up and cleaned up:

Sim­ple is good. A redesigned, stream­lined inter­face gives you more of what you need and less of what you don’t. The new look max­i­mizes the area of the screen that dis­plays the webpage.

3. Pro­ceed with cau­tion. You may be aware that the abil­ity of IE ver­sion 6 and below to ren­der web pages accord­ing to the “W3C spec­i­fi­ca­tion”: was … less than opti­mal. Again, the good news is that a whole lot of those ren­der­ing bugs are fixed with IE7.

The not-​so-​good news is that mil­lions of web pages were built to over­come those bugs, which will dis­ap­pear in IE7. So, please real­ize that some of those pages may look a lit­tle funny after you upgrade to IE7. Some things will be too big or too lit­tle, or shifted out of place, or even over­lap some­thing else.

Don’t worry, web design­ers are already busy test­ing and tun­ing their sites to accom­mo­date, and every­thing will set­tle down quickly.

4. Enjoy new fea­tures, such as:

• Browser tabs, which allows you to open mul­ti­ple sites at once, each in a sep­a­rate tab of the same browser win­dow. You can also see thumb­nail images of all open tabs in a sin­gle view.

• Sub­scribe to your favorite sites, includ­ing news and blogs. These sub­scrip­tions often use a tech­nol­ogy called RSS, which means “Really Sim­ple Syndication.”

• Improved print­ing options, includ­ing auto­mat­i­cally shrink­ing text for a bet­ter fit on a printed page, cus­tomiz­able page lay­outs, head­ers and foot­ers, and print space.

• “Open instant search” IE7 has a cus­tomiz­able open search box.

Search the Inter­net directly from the browser frame using your favorite search provider with the instant search box.

• More real estate. The inter­face ele­ments, called “browser chrome,” includes the menu bar, sta­tus bar, and tool­bars. These ele­ments are smaller in IE7, leav­ing more avail­able space for web page content.

5. Learn old fea­tures, such as:

• Hover that mouse. Since most peo­ple don’t read the help files, point your mouse at any­thing you don’t rec­og­nize. Don’t click it imme­di­ately, but just hover there. In a sec­ond or two, a lit­tle hint may pop up, telling you what that thing does. (This won’t hap­pen every­where, but can be helpful.)

• Learn the key­board. It’s time to learn a faster way. You’re wast­ing time, every time your hand leaves the key­board to grab the mouse. Learn what the “tab” key does (and the “enter” key, too), and the other key­board shortcuts.

• Right click. A use­ful tip, almost always. When­ever you don’t know how to do some­thing, or what some­thing does, or how to do some­thing with a par­tic­u­lar thing, point at it and right-​click that mouse. A menu will pop up, and it will be dif­fer­ent depend­ing on what­ever you’re point­ing at. It’s as if the browser’s try­ing to antic­i­pate what you might want, even if you don’t know what you want.

Note: Cur­rent browsers (includ­ing IE6) already do this. But many peo­ple don’t know, so it’s news to the aver­age person.

6. Surf with secu­rity. Secu­rity is sup­posed to be a pri­or­ity in IE7. Hope­fully their efforts at mak­ing Inter­net Explorer more secure will “just work.”

Speak­ing of secu­rity, IE7 has a new secu­rity fea­ture which tries to alert you of pos­si­ble phish­ing sites. The term “phish­ing” refers to crim­i­nals who want to “go fish” for your pri­vate information.

7. Say good­bye to IE6. And don’t look back.

In the mean­time, bet­ter browsers are available

Alter­na­tively, you don’t need to wait for IE7 to get a bet­ter browser now. There are sev­eral excel­lent choices:

• “Get Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/.
• “Opera”:http://www.opera.com/
• “Flock”:http://www.flock.com/

Lots of good browsers out there. Most of them tuned up their ren­der­ing engines a long time ago, and have dif­fer­ent fea­tures and benefits.

An amus­ing dis­cus­sion about browser choices, in the form of a hypo­thet­i­cal “per­sona” who chooses each browser, tries to answer: What does your browser reveal about you?

Which to choose for now? I rec­om­mend Fire­fox, to every­one who will listen.

Con­clu­sion

There’s a lot of excite­ment about IE7, and for good reason.

In sum­mary, the sit­u­a­tion is fairly sim­ple: IE6 is essen­tially obso­lete, and IE7 is much bet­ter. (But other browsers may already be there.)

This arti­cle is © Mont­gomery 2006. Some rights released with a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-​NonCommercial-​ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Also pub­lished at God­bit.