Microsoft's Internet Explorer finally catches up

After five years without a major upgrade to its Web browser, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 7 on Oct. 18. Since then, millions have downloaded it, and more should receive it through automatic Windows updates on their PCs. How well does it work? How does it compare with competitors, including Firefox 2, released about 10 days later? What can you expect if you decide to use IE 7? Here are excerpts from three leading reviewers.

By Rob Pegoraro
The Washington Post

Don't be alarmed. If you're still using Internet Explorer 6, much less any older version, you need this upgrade. You've been stuck with a browser that lends you too little help in staying on top of the Web, and out of trouble on it.

Users of other browsers ... may feel right at home. Like those, IE 7 offers tabbed browsing, which cures screen gridlock by letting you view multiple Web pages in one window, and a search shortcut at the top right that sends a query to your choice of search engines.

It also can subscribe to free Web feeds, which spare your keyboard's refresh key by letting Web sites tell you when they've posted new items.

Microsoft has made its own tweaks to these borrowed features. For example, if you've opened so many pages in tabs that you're getting lost, clicking a "Quick Tabs" button fills the window with miniature views of each open page.

And when you preview a Web feed by clicking on an orange icon in IE 7's toolbar, a little search form lets you peek into its archives to see how often a topic of interest has been covered.

Internet Explorer 7 can also look out for "phishing" sites, the phony pages that impersonate banks and credit-card issuers.

If desired, it will check every new page against a blacklist of known phishing offenders, then block your access to any site on it.

Meanwhile, IE 7 highlights legitimate financial sites that use encryption to keep out online snoops by putting a big lock icon in the address bar. ...

But none of those features will be as immediately noticed as IE 7's new interface. This browser ditches traditional text menus in favor of toolbar buttons that sometimes double as drop-down menus.

This sleek design takes up much less space but lacks consistency and bumps some often-used functions, like the home-page button, to odd locations.

In any case, if you've been using IE 6 for years, you may not know where to click when IE 7 lands on your computer.

James Coates
Chicago Tribune

The reason I think you should get rid of IE 6, or whatever you're limping along with, is that love 'em or hate 'em, Microsoft's software engineers delivered a truly grand set of improvements this time. ...

The sweeping changes ... include both safety and usability fixes. The most obvious one is the reduced size of the toolbar display at the top of the page. The old icons have either shrunk or vanished.

This one move makes the browser display fill more of each Web page and, combined with new features for zooming and quick display of open pages, lets users get much more out of each page visited.

Above all, the display is based on a change from ordinary screen fonts to alphabets based on the True Type used in modern Windows applications. The result is a crisp look to written material.

If a Web site uses tiny type, a quick click on an icon in the new toolbar lets you enlarge the page by percentages of 125, 150, 200 and 400.

On the topic of zooming, a new printer feature automatically reduces the size of a page so that it will print out in either portrait or landscape orientation without stuff running off the page. ...

As to look and feel, most visible are the new back and forward arrows that, instead of being on different sides of the bar, are a pair of aqua-blue pointers next to each other. This will save heavy users miles of mouse movement.

Mike Himowitz
The Baltimore Sun

IE 7's new features (which will be in the Windows Vista version, too) fall into two categories — usability and security.

Chief among the former is tabbed browsing, a feature the competition has offered for years. It means IE 7 allows you to open multiple Web pages in the same browser window and switch among them by clicking labeled tabs on the command bar. ...

Elsewhere, Microsoft has redesigned the menus, buttons and icons at the top of the screen to streamline IE's command center and devote more real estate to the contents of the Web site you're browsing.

But rearranging the furniture doesn't always make it easier to navigate the room.

For example, in previous IE versions, the Forward, Back, Stop, Refresh and Home Page icons were all at the top left of the toolbar.

In IE 7, only the Forward and Back buttons remain where they were. Stop and Refresh are on the right of the address bar, and the other important buttons have migrated to the lower right side of the toolbar.

On the upside, a built-in search box at the upper right of the tool bar makes it easy to launch a direct Web search without visiting the search engine's Web page.

By default, IE 7 uses MSN search, but it's easy enough to add others to the list or change the default to Google, Yahoo! or another search engine. ...

Microsoft has done a good job of integrating Really Simple Syndication feeds into the browser's everyday operations. RSS is a publishing system that allows your browser to update regular features or categories of news from Web sites that support it. ...

I did run into a few glitches that were surprising in a release that was tested as well as this one should have been.

For example, in many cases, the Back button wouldn't return me to the home page when I displayed a story on The Washington Post's Web site. The Back button worked fine when I used Mozilla and IE 6.

Likewise, the new browser cut off some headlines on New York Times stories, all of which displayed without problems using Firefox and IE 6.

Bottom line: If you're happy with Firefox or Opera, there's no need to switch to IE 7, but it's worth a look.

If you're still using IE 6, the IE 7 is definitely worth downloading.