So, IE7 was released today. Aren’t you excited? Yeah, me neither. But, I decided to download it and see if it sucked less than IE6. There are already thousands of reviews of IE7 out there, so I figure one more wouldn’t hurt.

Even before I got to use the new browser, I was put off by the fact that it took about 10 minutes to install and also required the typical post-Microsoft-install reboot. And, I noticed that it disabled my virus scanner when it started installing — doesn’t that mean that any application can do that?

Anyhow, on to my first impressions…

A slimmed down, cleaner user interface. It’s not really a shock as other MS products have been going down this path for a number of years. However, I’m not convinced that this is a good thing.

Tabs. I didn’t like them when Opera introduced them, but over the years, I’ve grown to love them in Firefox. Now I find it irritating when my browser opens new windows unless I explicitly tell it to do so. IE7′s tabs blend too much into the UI, so it’s almost difficult to see them. I like how IE7 has a nice little tab that you can click on to open a tab.

RSS. I didn’t play with this, but it’s cool that it’s finally supported.

Anti-phishing security. Again, I didn’t play with it, but hopefully it’ll help the average Joe.

Login and form completion. IE7 must have remembered my preference to not ask to store passwords for IE6. However, I couldn’t figure out how to convince it to start asking again. The options were set correctly under the “AutoComplete Settings” dialog, they just weren’t working. Since I didn’t have any special settings configured already, I just used the new “Reset Internet Explorer settings” feature under the Advanced tab to get rid of any IE6 preferences that might have been lingering. That seemed to fix the problem for a few sites. Saving a login/password for some restricted access sites like SharePoint doesn’t appear to be an option.

View Page Source. Why is there still no keyboard command to do this? As a web developer, this is extremely frustrating.

Internet Options. Instead of trimming the browser UI, they should have cleaned this configuration section up. I’m a tech guy, and I hate trying to find how to change options in their options menu. I pretty much just leave things alone unless some reason or another forces me to find how to tweak an option. (See Login and Form completion above).

Crashes and shutdown delays. After 3 hours of moderate use, I’m happy to say that it hasn’t locked up yet. Although it has become unresponsive and/or slow, and has forced me to close the window. Sometimes clicking on the close window icon takes 15 seconds for IE7 to give up and die.

First-run start page. It asks you some configuration questions when you start, then sets the home page to MSN. Fine, but I changed it to a blank page because MSN takes too long to load. 2 hours later, it decided to change back to the First-run page again. How often is this going to happen?

Speed. I haven’t clocked anything, but page loads appear noticably slower than Firefox and IE6.

Page load icon. The rotating “e” has been replaced with a spinning circle on the tabs. It gives up waiting for pages that take a long time to load. You can only tell that the connection is still open by looking at the bottom status bar that says “Waiting for …”

Although I’m happy Microsoft has finally updated it’s antiquated IE6 browser, I guess I’m just underwhelmed with this latest version. This took how many months to deliver?

However, now that Microsoft is once again developing IE, I hope they continue to enhance it and get compliant with all of the existing web standards instead of waiting another 5 years for their next major overhaul. We can only hope.

Last November, when my wife and I moved to Mexico, we packed our Honda Civic with some basic necessities: clothing, a digital camera, multiple Spanish dictionaries, books, a laptop, etc. Space was our limiting factor, so we decided that we’d only pack things that we truly thought we’d need for our 6 month stay. Unfortunately, I had to say goodbye to my computer lab, consisting of a few Linux desktops and a few Windows XP desktops. Not only that, I had to go back to sharing a computer. One of many sacrifices we had to make for the experience of living in a foreign country for half a year.

Fast forward to the present…

Sharing a computer with my wife, who is also a programmer and an avid internet research junky, was not much fun. Therefore, we have since purchased another laptop to ease our time sharing problem.
However, things are far from perfect.

I have been developing websites, internet applications, and software for the past 15 years. Most of that time has been programming on Unix and Linux machines. There were a few months, here and there, where I developed Windows applications, using Visual C++. However, I’ve always felt much more productive developing software in a *nix environment.

My Dell laptop is currently running Windows XP. It functions fine for web surfing, watching movies, photo and video editing, and keeping track of our ever dwindling finances. However, I just can’t seem to be very productive as a software developer on it. It feels like I only spend 40% of my time being productive. I’m not exactly sure what all of my issues are, but a few off the top of my head:

• Rebooting after installing or removing software. Why is this still necessary?
• Lack of a robust command prompt. Considering Windows is cut-and-paste friendly in most of their apps, why is it so difficult to add this functionality to the command prompt? Why does the copy feature (Mark) select a box region, and not work like every other cut-and-paste app? Why can’t I resize the app like every other app out there?
• Starting and stopping services. I hate digging through the control panel to find the service admin tool. There’s probably a command line way of doing this, but I haven’t discovered it yet.
• No virtual desktops. In a normal day, I’m probably switching between 7-10 active applications. Finding the one I want using Alt-tab or the taskbar repeatedly eats away my valuable time.

Yes, I know there are many add-on applications I can install to fix some of these issues, but the ones I’ve tried all seem kludgy.

For instance, I installed cygwin. Cygwin’s default terminal uses the command prompt, so I still can’t cut-and-paste. I assume I could set up xterm to do this, but after a few months, I still haven’t gone through the effort to find out how. Due to cygwin’s psuedo-paths and real Windows paths, setting up applications and scripts is a nightmare. All in all, cygwin has probably introduced as many problems as it has solved.

There are probably some real solutions out there, if I chose to find them. However, going out and finding them contributes to my 60% of unproductive time.

I’m just waiting for my next trip back to Chicago (in August), when I’ll retrieve one of my Linux desktops and end this misery.