Karpa Korner – IE7 Beta2 under the microscope

Posted by

Our crack team of Tec Spies delivered this steaming hot delivery into our R&D labs late yesterday. It is still bloodstained as I write this (in IE7 no less!!) but was it worth the life of so many of our valuable ex-GIC’ers to deliver it? Let’s have a look…

Installing

I didn’t install this baby, oh no, if you run the install you will wipe your previous stable IE6 install out. Not a thing most will want to do I would suspect. So, how do you actually get it working then? You need to unpack the installer (open it in WinZip or your archiving application of choice. I prefer WinRAR personally,) into a folder and you will be left with a load of files.
Result.
(on a side note, I cannot disable the popup blocker which is really nippy, especially when my blogging interface uses popups… gotta love pre-beta software!)
Now you have your folder of files. Try and run it and it gives some evil error. If like me you believe that rapidly clicking a file and then clicking on any other likely candidate might change its mind you will be learning a lesson in frustration.

To save you that grief here’s what to do:

1. Delete the Update folder that is created when you extract the files. Updates are bad m’kay?

2. Delete the shlwapi.dll file, it’s the one that makes it all not work (thats not the technical reason, I don’t know that, I do know it caused me a good wee while of wailing and gnashing of teeth).

3. Create a blank file named IEXPLORE.exe.local and stick it into the folder you extracted all the files to.

4. Click iexplore.exe and enjoy the power of IE7 (or watch your machine give you the BSOD... It is a pre release after all)

First impressions

Honestly?

Firefox.

Ok, I’ll expand on that. The interface is very close to that of Firefox, position of search boxes, look of buttons, TABS (Yes, tabs it only took the multi billion behemoth that is Microsoft years after the likes of Opera and Mozilla to implement this) pop-up blockers, the works. Here is a little taster of the interface:

As you might be able to see it looks a wee bitty like firefox (Ok, my firefox is a ‘bit’ modified, but I’m sure you can see the similarities!)

Some of the Keyboard shortcuts are the same, a new tab is CTRL+T in both and I’m sure that once it ships there will be a fair few more similarities. One of the features I do like is the Quick Tabs (CTRL+Q) which shows you thumbnails of all your open tabs! It’s sort of like the Tab Preview extension for firefox but all in one page for easy scanning. Nice.

There should be an embedded RSS reader with IE7, I couldn’t get it to work but when it is fully implemented it should be a sweet little addon (not that its new either, thunderbird has had it for ages and there are a million and one extensions for RSS in Firefox, but nice for them to catch up at long last…)

Two points to make:

1. It is very slow to start up.

2. Don’t try and play with the placement of the toolbars unless you want the menus to vanish underneath something and refuse to come out! I spent five minutes cursing and trying to get them to come back. Hopefully it is only a beta bug and not a feature…

As far as it rendering pages, I still see some differences in how it renders text. it seems a little larger in IE. The css rendering should be improved but I’ve not had the chance to explore the box model properly.

(side note: Our wandering Samurai has pointed out that it seems to not like opening new windows so target=_blank is frazzled… yet another “feature” methinks)

It will have PNG transparency sorted (they say) which for me will make my heart sing with joy. But enough writing, I am off to break some sites (or give myself a BSOD session) and I would recommend that you do too!