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[B][U]Internet Explorer 7[/U][/B]It’s been a good 5 years since Microsoft have released a fully featured upgrade version of their Internet Explorer web browser, but on October 18th, 2006, they finally got around to it.
Internet Explorer 7 is available as a free download for legitimate Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows XP Pro x64, and Windows Server 2003 users. It will also be the version included with Windows Vista.
User interface
The user interface has been dramatically changed from previous Internet Explorer versions. This is to bring the look more in line with Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista. Getting used to this new look may take a little while, but it does allow a little bit more space for the actual web pages you are viewing.
The address bar now appears at the top of the browser window, with the back and forward buttons to the left, and the refresh and stop buttons to the right. To the right of this, a new search bar appears, which replicates that of other web browsers. Below that and to the left, the two favourite centre and add to favourites buttons appear, after which the browser tabs are located, followed by the remaining command bar buttons.
By default, the old top menu no longer appears, as these functions have been recreated on the command bar. If you want, you can get this back by pressing the ALT key, or selecting the menu bar option under tools.
Unfortunately, unlike IE 6, you’re not able to move the menu and buttons around to be placed as you’d prefer. Nor can you use a classic IE option, which may annoy some.
Search bar
Because searching the web is considered one of the most widely used methods of actually finding a web site, Internet Explorer’s new search box gives the user the ability to type in their search term and search their chosen search provided without having to browse to a search providers web site first. While this may not sounds revolutionary, the main benefit is the drop-down menu to the right of the search button, which can contain more than one search provider, which makes searching multiple web services a lot easier.
When installing Internet Explorer 7, the default (pre-selected) search option will be whichever provider Internet Explorer 6 used, but adding additional search providers is relatively easy. When browsing a web site that offers a search function, the drop-down menu will glow yellow, informing you that such a search option exists. If you wish to use it there and then, you can, or you can add it to your search provider list, and make use of their search services at any time.
Note: Freeola’s cheats, walkthrough, and domain name web sites offer such search function, which are compatible with Internet Explorer 7.
Tabs
IE 7 is the first version of Internet Explorer to use tabs, in a similar manor to how other web browsers have been for quite some time. The tabs take up a small amount of space near the top left of the browser window, and take up about half the width. When opening multiple tabs, each tab will reduce in size, up to a point where left and right arrows will appear to allow you to scroll the current tabs, rather than have them bunch up so much that you can’t actually use them. Each tab contains the web page title, and an icon image if one is available.
A new tab button appears at the end of the tab list, to make opening a new one nice and simple. A quick tabs feature is also built-in, which automatically appears when you have more than one tab open. This feature appears as a small button to the far left of the tab list, and contains a small menu that lists the page titles of each tab. Clicking on the required title results in jumping to that tab. The feature also displays thumbnail views of all the tabs open, which makes selection easier if the page title isn’t descriptive enough.
The home option has been extended to allow you the ability to set multiple pages as your home page, with each appearing in a separate tab.
Unfortunately, the current system appears slow to respond at times, having to wait for a selected tab to appear, with even the create a blank tab function requiring a lot of effort on the part of the web browser. If you have a number of tabs open, the slow down can becomes quite annoying, with slight freezes randomly occurring*.
*Though in Microsoft’s defence, this could just be unique on my computer
Command bar
Internet Explorer 7 has recreated many of the previous top menu options as buttons on the command bar, which includes the home, feed, print, page, tools and help options.
Favourites centre
IE favourites have been reorganised to appear to the left of the browser window, and contains the old fashion browser favourites, as well as the new web feeds and browser history.
When browsing through your favourites, you can select to open each in a new tab, without the list of web sites disappearing, which allows you easy access to multiple sites at a time. The feed options lists your current web feeds, in the same way as it does your favourites.
Feed reader
Web feeds are becoming more and more commonplace on the web, and as such IE 7 includes a web feed reader, which makes the process of subscribing to a web feed and use simple. When you come across a web site that offers a web feed, such as the BBC, the feed icon will light up. Clicking on the icon will display the feed to you in a readable format, and offer you the chance to subscribe (effectively adding it to your favourites). If a web site offers you more than one feed, the small drop-down menu option of the feed icon will allow you to select which one you wish to view.
Using a feed reader can make browsing regularly updated web sites easier to manage, because IE will check for and download the latest web feed often, saving you the trouble of browsing each of those sites separately, only to find you’ve already caught up with the latest content they offer.
Secure connection identifier
Internet Explorer 7 has moved the location of the golden (yellow) padlock, that previously appeared in the lower toolbar, to appear within the web browsers address bar. No doubt in response to the same tactic applied by other browser vendors, the padlock now appears with a turquoise background, placed between the address bar pull-down menu and refresh button. Clicking the padlock icon will display certificate information about the current web site.
Phishing filter
Phishing is a term than refers to a web site or email pretending to be a legitimate site (such as a bank, paypal, ebay, etc) with the hope of obtaining a users personal details and using them fraudulently (stealing money, identity theft, etc). The phishing filter in IE 7 aims to curb such a thing as best it can.
When enabled (by the user), the phishing filter will check each web address with a central Microsoft web server, checking to ensure the web address is not listed as a fraudulent web site. The web servers are updated all the time with the latest scam site addresses, and if a web site address that you try to load up is listed as a phishing site, Internet Explorer will provide a full page warning to the user, and highlight the address bar in red.
IE also includes built-in phishing detection, which is intended as an additional security feature, and if it believes a web site is a scam, will highlight the web address yellow.
While the red, yellow and green (traffic light effect) colours make sense, Firefox uses a yellow address bar to indicate a secure web site, which can be confusing if you’ve just switched from one browser to the other.
High assurance certificates (coming soon, apparently)
A new type of security certificate is under development, which is known as a high assurance certificate. This type of certificate will cause the address bar to turn green, and indicates that a web site has been vetted, and is deemed trusted and secure.
Currently this feature is not implemented, but is in the making, and is aimed and making the Internet a much more secure medium. When released, it'll become available via the Microsoft Update web site.
Protected mode (Windows Vista only)
Protected mode is a Windows Vista exclusive feature, which is designed to prevent attacks on your computer from having much effect. This is done because the web browser is run with what is called “reduced privileges”.
Privileges in computer software speak refers to what a piece of software can and can’t do on a users computer. Previously, Internet Explorer was allowed a relatively high privilege rating, so it could read, write and delete files from your hard drive with little recourse. This resulted in a lot of security alerts, where by a simple web page hosting some nasty code could access and play havoc with a users PC, simply because that user viewed a web page. The code on the web page would tell Internet Explorer to read, write or delete files, and IE would do it.
IE 7 in Vista is given a far lower privilege rating, and so if the same situation occurs, the chances of this nasty code having any such effect are greatly reduced. When such a web site is viewed, Vista simply refuses to execute such an action, because IE does not have the required privileges.
Protected mode is not available for the Windows XP version, due to the differences between XP and Vista.
ClearType
ClearType is a method for supposedly making text a lot clearer when appearing on screen, though in reality it is one of those ‘maybe’ features, in that you may prefer it, you may not. You can enable / disable ClearType within the IE options screen, and use whichever setting you feel more comfortable with.
Internet options
The Internet Explorer options screen hasn’t been changed too much from previous versions, having only really been slightly modified to adopt the tabs, feeds, and multi home page options.
Page Zoom
To the bottom right of the browser is the new zoom function, which allows a web page to be zoomed in on at the click of a button. This is a full page zoom, and is quite different from previous text resize option.
Whereas before, when resizing the page text, the web site would sometimes become hard to view (overlapping text, images, etc); page zoom literally zooms in on the whole page, keeping the layout the same, but making the site readable if you find the text to be too small.
Page printing
The page printing feature has been improved quite a bit, with the introduction of shrink to fit. Previously when printing a page, you might find a lot of the content to the right being missed completely, or printed on separate pages in a way that was difficult to use.
IE 7 now allows you to alter the margins before printing, using on screen markers when previewing a print, and attempts to ensure all content is printed out in a useful order, pushing images from one page on to the next if need be, rather than only half printing them.
Overall rating
I would give Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP a rating of 7 / 10 or 70% (75% for Windows Vista), because while it is a good web browser with some nice additions over IE 6, from a company the size of Microsoft, I’d expect something a lot more user friendly and streamlined. Currently, I think better alternatives exist.
If you’re a current user of Firefox, Opera or another non-IE web browser, there is probably nothing Internet Explorer 7 can offer you. However, if you currently use Internet Explorer 6, I would recommend you upgrade, at the very least for the security upgrades.
There have been no replies to this thread yet.
[B][U]Internet Explorer 7[/U][/B]It’s been a good 5 years since Microsoft have released a fully featured upgrade version of their Internet Explorer web browser, but on October 18th, 2006, they finally got around to it.
Internet Explorer 7 is available as a free download for legitimate Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows XP Pro x64, and Windows Server 2003 users. It will also be the version included with Windows Vista.
User interface
The user interface has been dramatically changed from previous Internet Explorer versions. This is to bring the look more in line with Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista. Getting used to this new look may take a little while, but it does allow a little bit more space for the actual web pages you are viewing.
The address bar now appears at the top of the browser window, with the back and forward buttons to the left, and the refresh and stop buttons to the right. To the right of this, a new search bar appears, which replicates that of other web browsers. Below that and to the left, the two favourite centre and add to favourites buttons appear, after which the browser tabs are located, followed by the remaining command bar buttons.
By default, the old top menu no longer appears, as these functions have been recreated on the command bar. If you want, you can get this back by pressing the ALT key, or selecting the menu bar option under tools.
Unfortunately, unlike IE 6, you’re not able to move the menu and buttons around to be placed as you’d prefer. Nor can you use a classic IE option, which may annoy some.
Search bar
Because searching the web is considered one of the most widely used methods of actually finding a web site, Internet Explorer’s new search box gives the user the ability to type in their search term and search their chosen search provided without having to browse to a search providers web site first. While this may not sounds revolutionary, the main benefit is the drop-down menu to the right of the search button, which can contain more than one search provider, which makes searching multiple web services a lot easier.
When installing Internet Explorer 7, the default (pre-selected) search option will be whichever provider Internet Explorer 6 used, but adding additional search providers is relatively easy. When browsing a web site that offers a search function, the drop-down menu will glow yellow, informing you that such a search option exists. If you wish to use it there and then, you can, or you can add it to your search provider list, and make use of their search services at any time.
Note: Freeola’s cheats, walkthrough, and domain name web sites offer such search function, which are compatible with Internet Explorer 7.
Tabs
IE 7 is the first version of Internet Explorer to use tabs, in a similar manor to how other web browsers have been for quite some time. The tabs take up a small amount of space near the top left of the browser window, and take up about half the width. When opening multiple tabs, each tab will reduce in size, up to a point where left and right arrows will appear to allow you to scroll the current tabs, rather than have them bunch up so much that you can’t actually use them. Each tab contains the web page title, and an icon image if one is available.
A new tab button appears at the end of the tab list, to make opening a new one nice and simple. A quick tabs feature is also built-in, which automatically appears when you have more than one tab open. This feature appears as a small button to the far left of the tab list, and contains a small menu that lists the page titles of each tab. Clicking on the required title results in jumping to that tab. The feature also displays thumbnail views of all the tabs open, which makes selection easier if the page title isn’t descriptive enough.
The home option has been extended to allow you the ability to set multiple pages as your home page, with each appearing in a separate tab.
Unfortunately, the current system appears slow to respond at times, having to wait for a selected tab to appear, with even the create a blank tab function requiring a lot of effort on the part of the web browser. If you have a number of tabs open, the slow down can becomes quite annoying, with slight freezes randomly occurring*.
*Though in Microsoft’s defence, this could just be unique on my computer
Command bar
Internet Explorer 7 has recreated many of the previous top menu options as buttons on the command bar, which includes the home, feed, print, page, tools and help options.
Favourites centre
IE favourites have been reorganised to appear to the left of the browser window, and contains the old fashion browser favourites, as well as the new web feeds and browser history.
When browsing through your favourites, you can select to open each in a new tab, without the list of web sites disappearing, which allows you easy access to multiple sites at a time. The feed options lists your current web feeds, in the same way as it does your favourites.
Feed reader
Web feeds are becoming more and more commonplace on the web, and as such IE 7 includes a web feed reader, which makes the process of subscribing to a web feed and use simple. When you come across a web site that offers a web feed, such as the BBC, the feed icon will light up. Clicking on the icon will display the feed to you in a readable format, and offer you the chance to subscribe (effectively adding it to your favourites). If a web site offers you more than one feed, the small drop-down menu option of the feed icon will allow you to select which one you wish to view.
Using a feed reader can make browsing regularly updated web sites easier to manage, because IE will check for and download the latest web feed often, saving you the trouble of browsing each of those sites separately, only to find you’ve already caught up with the latest content they offer.
Secure connection identifier
Internet Explorer 7 has moved the location of the golden (yellow) padlock, that previously appeared in the lower toolbar, to appear within the web browsers address bar. No doubt in response to the same tactic applied by other browser vendors, the padlock now appears with a turquoise background, placed between the address bar pull-down menu and refresh button. Clicking the padlock icon will display certificate information about the current web site.
Phishing filter
Phishing is a term than refers to a web site or email pretending to be a legitimate site (such as a bank, paypal, ebay, etc) with the hope of obtaining a users personal details and using them fraudulently (stealing money, identity theft, etc). The phishing filter in IE 7 aims to curb such a thing as best it can.
When enabled (by the user), the phishing filter will check each web address with a central Microsoft web server, checking to ensure the web address is not listed as a fraudulent web site. The web servers are updated all the time with the latest scam site addresses, and if a web site address that you try to load up is listed as a phishing site, Internet Explorer will provide a full page warning to the user, and highlight the address bar in red.
IE also includes built-in phishing detection, which is intended as an additional security feature, and if it believes a web site is a scam, will highlight the web address yellow.
While the red, yellow and green (traffic light effect) colours make sense, Firefox uses a yellow address bar to indicate a secure web site, which can be confusing if you’ve just switched from one browser to the other.
High assurance certificates (coming soon, apparently)
A new type of security certificate is under development, which is known as a high assurance certificate. This type of certificate will cause the address bar to turn green, and indicates that a web site has been vetted, and is deemed trusted and secure.
Currently this feature is not implemented, but is in the making, and is aimed and making the Internet a much more secure medium. When released, it'll become available via the Microsoft Update web site.
Protected mode (Windows Vista only)
Protected mode is a Windows Vista exclusive feature, which is designed to prevent attacks on your computer from having much effect. This is done because the web browser is run with what is called “reduced privileges”.
Privileges in computer software speak refers to what a piece of software can and can’t do on a users computer. Previously, Internet Explorer was allowed a relatively high privilege rating, so it could read, write and delete files from your hard drive with little recourse. This resulted in a lot of security alerts, where by a simple web page hosting some nasty code could access and play havoc with a users PC, simply because that user viewed a web page. The code on the web page would tell Internet Explorer to read, write or delete files, and IE would do it.
IE 7 in Vista is given a far lower privilege rating, and so if the same situation occurs, the chances of this nasty code having any such effect are greatly reduced. When such a web site is viewed, Vista simply refuses to execute such an action, because IE does not have the required privileges.
Protected mode is not available for the Windows XP version, due to the differences between XP and Vista.
ClearType
ClearType is a method for supposedly making text a lot clearer when appearing on screen, though in reality it is one of those ‘maybe’ features, in that you may prefer it, you may not. You can enable / disable ClearType within the IE options screen, and use whichever setting you feel more comfortable with.
Internet options
The Internet Explorer options screen hasn’t been changed too much from previous versions, having only really been slightly modified to adopt the tabs, feeds, and multi home page options.
Page Zoom
To the bottom right of the browser is the new zoom function, which allows a web page to be zoomed in on at the click of a button. This is a full page zoom, and is quite different from previous text resize option.
Whereas before, when resizing the page text, the web site would sometimes become hard to view (overlapping text, images, etc); page zoom literally zooms in on the whole page, keeping the layout the same, but making the site readable if you find the text to be too small.
Page printing
The page printing feature has been improved quite a bit, with the introduction of shrink to fit. Previously when printing a page, you might find a lot of the content to the right being missed completely, or printed on separate pages in a way that was difficult to use.
IE 7 now allows you to alter the margins before printing, using on screen markers when previewing a print, and attempts to ensure all content is printed out in a useful order, pushing images from one page on to the next if need be, rather than only half printing them.
Overall rating
I would give Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP a rating of 7 / 10 or 70% (75% for Windows Vista), because while it is a good web browser with some nice additions over IE 6, from a company the size of Microsoft, I’d expect something a lot more user friendly and streamlined. Currently, I think better alternatives exist.
If you’re a current user of Firefox, Opera or another non-IE web browser, there is probably nothing Internet Explorer 7 can offer you. However, if you currently use Internet Explorer 6, I would recommend you upgrade, at the very least for the security upgrades.