IE7: still worse than the competition
A few recent observations regarding Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 (IE7):
1) Had a neighbor below me that gave IE7 an install on his Windows XP pro install on a home computer. Unfortunately, he was not pleased by its performance and how it goofed up the rest of his shell (apparently). Attempting to uninstall it, however, resulted in catastrophic loss of system-required files, principally shared DLLs. Whether or not he went through appropriate install/uninstall procedures is unbeknownst to me, but he's a pretty tech-savvy guy, so I've given him the benefit of the doubt.
2) The Zimbra organization, which produces an online Outlook replacement, recently decided to put MS's most recent IE7 release to the test on their AJAXified system. It does sound like Microsoft has made significant strides in the browser, with several notable memory leaks patched. In particular, MS claims that their browser will finally be standards-compliant and properly use CSS (FINALLY!!!). It's this fact that has me a bit excited: will Microsoft actually produce a browser that will finally permit web-designers to abandon the many hacks that must be employed just to get a nice designed site working with their crappy browser? In terms of browser performance, however, the Zimbra group noted that rendering times were still below that of Firefox (in some cases, pages loaded half as fast).
I daresay that IE7 has little to offer web-users who have made the switch years ago out of frustration induced by their insecure and non-compliant browser, however. It's gonna be a hard sell to try and reobtain the market share they've lost so far.
1) Had a neighbor below me that gave IE7 an install on his Windows XP pro install on a home computer. Unfortunately, he was not pleased by its performance and how it goofed up the rest of his shell (apparently). Attempting to uninstall it, however, resulted in catastrophic loss of system-required files, principally shared DLLs. Whether or not he went through appropriate install/uninstall procedures is unbeknownst to me, but he's a pretty tech-savvy guy, so I've given him the benefit of the doubt.
2) The Zimbra organization, which produces an online Outlook replacement, recently decided to put MS's most recent IE7 release to the test on their AJAXified system. It does sound like Microsoft has made significant strides in the browser, with several notable memory leaks patched. In particular, MS claims that their browser will finally be standards-compliant and properly use CSS (FINALLY!!!). It's this fact that has me a bit excited: will Microsoft actually produce a browser that will finally permit web-designers to abandon the many hacks that must be employed just to get a nice designed site working with their crappy browser? In terms of browser performance, however, the Zimbra group noted that rendering times were still below that of Firefox (in some cases, pages loaded half as fast).
I daresay that IE7 has little to offer web-users who have made the switch years ago out of frustration induced by their insecure and non-compliant browser, however. It's gonna be a hard sell to try and reobtain the market share they've lost so far.
posted by mrbiotech at
3:34 PM
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3 comments
