IE 7 Review Tips by Burleson Consulting

As an Oracle developer I'm stuck using MS Internet Explorer because FireFox does not render dynamic HTML-DB with Java properly.

This review shows some great new features of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) with some direct comparisons to FireFox:

• Easy to subscribe to RSS feeds in IE 7

• IE 7 has a re-sizing and shrinking feature for better printing

• IE 7 supports the Google Toolbar

• Better security in IE7 (can't get worse)

• Phishing feature of IE7 for Grandma

You can download the IE 7 beta here.  I decided to be brave and try IE 7 and here are my thoughts.

My Review of IE 7

A large motive for my beta review of IE7 was prompted by the thought "How could it possibly be any worse than IE 6?".

IE 7 installed flawlessly and kept my Google toolbar (suprize).  However the installer trashed all of my stored passwords in favor of their new, more secure approach.

My Favorite IE7 feature is tabbed windows, just like in FireFox:

I was also happy to dump my old RSS aggregator.  The IE 7 browser has a nice built-in RSS feed manager:

All you need to do is enter the URL, and a "top area" appears in the web page display, offering to let you subscribe to the RSS feed:

To see your RSS feeds in IE 7 , you click on the star icon (Favorites) and see the RSS feed button:

You can also globally control RSS new feed settings in IE7, a nice new feature:

One limitation is that IE 7 does not appear to support more sophisticated RSS feeds that employ Document Type Definitions (DTD), a surprising limitation since DTD's have been a coding standard since SGML days:

The Phishing window is a great idea because alerts about Phishing site can be instantly transmitted from MS headquarters to all IE 7 users, keeping Grandma safe from Phishing attacks:

In sum, I found the IE 7 beta to be very useful and I'm glad that I made the move to the IE 7 beta.

References

This review of IE 7 notes that IE 7 has a focus on better security:

"Security was the No. 1 investment we made in IE 7, in terms of our development resources . .

more than 1,000 bugs have been dealt with . .

Microsoft's phishing filter uses three methods to prevent people from surfing to spoofed sites, Packer said. It analyzes Web pages and checks for characteristics of phishing sites; it compares addresses to a blacklist of known bad sites; and it includes a list of known trusted Web sites."

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