Tim Almond

I’d just read on Slashdot that the first public beta of Internet Explorer 7 is available for download.

I went off to Microsoft.com to download, but thought I’d check out the quick tour of new features. The “new features” here would be like an Iraqi trying to tell you how great this new “democracy” is. The bottom line is that if you are already running Firefox, most of these “features” arrived 9th November 2004.

Let’s run through them:-

• “New Interface”. Thanks, I’ve already got a skinnable interface. If I really wanted to, I could even change the XUL for Firefox to have it layed out exactly how I wanted it to.
• Tabbed Browsing. Got it again
• A search box. One more.
• RSS Feeds. And that. Although I think that RSS feeds in a browser make no sense.
• Security. This appears to be some sort of “anti-phishing” security. Whilst a laudable aim, I’d like to know what’s behind this. If it’s a register of known suspect sites, I wouldn’t trust it. If someone wants to tell me that it’s possible to identify all of them, then I’d expect there to be 100% spam filtering by now. In addition, unless Microsoft have removed the option to override the address bar via javascript, then there’s still a dangerous and unplugged hole. Thankfully, Firefox just gives you the true address, which is a good phishing alert.

Personally, I’ll be sticking with Firefox and Opera. Browsers that had these features a year ago and also now have features like scalable vector graphics.

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Tags: Technology //