Internet Explorer 7

And finally M$ has forced IE7 upon us all.

What a frustrating experience it is.

I fear for the future. If this is a sample of how Vista is going to look and work, I dispair, not for me but for the ordinary mortals out there who have to use this on a daily basis.

I like menus, I really do. You can find all the application features in the menus. You know what the app can do, its all there in the menus. Admittedly the menus have to be well thought out, but if they are, there isn't a problem.

Then along came toolbars. Toolbars are great when used in the right place. ie. I need a button to do X, where X is a very well defined function. Print. is a good example of a button. Pick a new tool, given a selection of 5 different tools. Good button use. I HATE what toolbars have become. Apps like MS Word, go to extreme lengths to invent buttons for Everything, and so you have loads of screen space taken up by button after button, with indeterminate meanings, and most of the buttons I will never use. So the first thing I do is remove ALL of the toolbars. I dont need them, I just access the menus, Alt-F->X to quit etc. Fast efficent, little screen space needed. If I need a more complex function I can usually find it soon enough. I dont need an extra button on the screen. The other problem with word, was that the menus werent particularly well thought out, but thats a different problem.

Rather than solving the menu, problem. MS in their infinite wisdom have decided to do away with with the menu bar. Now you have indeterminate button soup at the top of an application. Except for some buttons which have text, which also explains their function as the icon isnt explanitory enough. ( Which makes me wonder why bother with an icon if it doesnt adequatly explain what the button does?, and there isnt an option to show text only. ) All the buttons are now dual function, they not only provice one function by clicking on them, they have the little drop-down arrow to the right, which indicates that the button is also a menu. Instead you have to click on the narrow bit of the side of the button to access the menu, so rather than do away with a nice heirarchical menu structure, which was easy to access, you now have a set of random tricky to access menus, hidden behind random buttons.

Eventually I found out that the menu bar isnt gone entirely. It's still there but you have to hit the alt-key to make it appear, except rather than being at the top of the screen, its now in the middle of the button soup bar. I thought that maybe that wasn't so bad til I tried customize the setup and drag the menu bar to the top. I can't. Infact I can't move any of the toolbars from their existing position to any other position where I want them. Which means I am stuck with the layout that MS have decided I need.

So I have found the menus from the button-soup bar, and the real menus from the menu bar however, when comparing the menus I find that they contain the same things in a different order. So the menus themselves are inconsistent, which is confusing again.

What about normal operation: I can type in the menu bar and get to my page. That works, is simple and efficent. Well done, they've got that right. The custom search box, I have to configure it to use google, but that works like it should. Opening tabs using Ctrl-T works like it should. I've not checked website compatibility but I fully expect that to be a lot better than it used to be.

Will I use IE7 from now on?

Not if I can help it. I will keep using Firefox for now and for the foreseable future.