IE7b2 User Interface Review
By glazou on Friday 31 March 2006, 12:20 - General - Permalink
Microsoft recently released the second beta of IE 7. I have downloaded it, tried it and felt I have to write about it.
So I took another machine and installed it again, making screenshots of all my installation steps, capturing what I think is good and bad. The result is below.
1st Disclaimer : I did this test as an average user. I did not test the rendering of web sites, I did not test the security enhancements other than looking at the UI, I did not compare IE7b2 with IE6. I may have missed things - if they are well hidden. Or misunderstood things - if they're not clear enough. But there is not a single UI element or feature visible only from the chrome of IE7b2 I deliberately left behind. In that sense, I think this UI report is pretty exhaustive.
IE7 is like any other browser, an iceberg. The average user sees the 10% floating above the water level. I am reporting about that part, leaving the hidden 90% to more advanced reviews.
2nd Disclaimer : I'm a Mozillian, and used to be a Netscaper. I'm the lead engineer on Nvu, the HTML/XHTML Gecko-based wysiwyg editor. My company does mostly Mozilla-related work. But I really tried to write this report without having Mozilla or Firefox in mind, and tried to be fair.
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Comments
After having read your review, I too was disappointed by the new features. The UI is clearly targetting unexperienced people, it made too rapidly and by people who don't seem to know each other. But it must be round, use gradients, with a basic iconography. There's some disappointments that should not be in this Beta2.
It's just deceiving to see the two-three good points hidden with some huge mistakes. But they may have decided to take same graphical approach that WMP10, the Windows Security Center and so on (all of them deceived me).
Still using Firefox 1.5, after all. IE7, like IE6, won't miss me.
The only good new is that Vista won't depend on IE7..
Great review and spot on IMHO. MS is going to get some bad PR if they actually ship this and they deserve it. WTF have they been doing anyway these past seven years that this is the best they can pull off? It looks to me like they pulled together some random idiots from other projects, used whatever icons they had from earlier development, worked around the parts of their own source code they did not understand and then tried to put in the features everybody has been asking for.
Obviously they ran into some trouble implementing tabs. There's no other explanation for the rather bizarre UI that resulted. The menu below the tabs is so obviously a compromise with lack of code flexibility that it is almost funny. 'Hey the menubar can only go below the tabs, well bye bye menubar!' Quite sad really that this is the best they can do. Billions to spend and this is what you get?
If the UI looks bad already, what would the rest of the code look like?
Good review in general, thanks
Still don't see why you don't use PNG for screenshots, but hey...