I just upgraded to IE 7 on my home machine; I just love being on the cutting edge. I’ve been using the beta for several months, and was interested in seeing what differences there would be. A quick note: this article was written in Google Docs in the new IE version.
Upgrade process surprised me. It was surprisingly long, and not running in the background. I was wondering why the process needed to be so dominating of my system. I guess I had forgotten how tightly integrated IE is with Windows. The install required two reboots, which is surprising since installing Firefox from scratch doesn’t even need a single reboot. And takes far less time.
The first thing I noticed different about the release version versus the beta is the speed at which the tabs load. Not as quickly as Firefox, nor as cleanly, but much faster than the beta or the IE 6 with MSN Toolbar (OK, infinitely faster than that dog).
One other tab issue is that IE doesn’t always open new pages in a tab in the existing window. I occasionally have this problem with Firefox (opening messages in Hotmail, for instance), but it is very rare.
It annoys me how slowly new tabs open, and how slowly they close. Plus, there’s a system lag as they open/close. I’ve also noticed that, as I write this, there are some lags where the cursor takes a long time to catch up with my typing. I haven’t’ seen this in Firefox.
One nice thing was that all my toolbars seemed to update nicely after the install. Google gave me a little heads up that it had done so. Yahoo needed a more formal process (clicking on the “upgrade here” button), including restarting IE.
This is, probably, one of the better updates for IE (especially considering all the security issues of late). However, it’s not enough to catch it up to Firefox. Internet Explorer will be, as it’s been for sometime now, the browser I pull up for those sites that won’t work in Firefox (or that are a bit twitchy). For me, most of those sites are banking related. Oddly, I’ve found several sites that don’t work well on IE but fine on Firefox. More on that another time.
