Juvenall Wilson

You’re thinking, “well no shit, smartass”, right? Well, hear me out. As much as us nerds bash the company for troublesome products, draconian license schemes, complicated product versioning and it’s willingness to use it’s money to try and smite the little guy, it does do a number of things better than anyone else. Frankly, noting else demonstrates this better then the newly released Internet Explorer 7.

Now, while I could talk at length about the addition of tabs, the integrated RSS reader, improved (though not perfect) CSS support, highly streamlined interface and the slew of other features and improvements, I won’t. Those things have really been talked about and debated to death on every other blog, news site and community online. Some are awesome, some need work, others feel phoned in. What really stands out to me is how well these features were developed for novice computer users. To me, this is the company’s biggest strength and they’ve certainly capitalized on that.

This is most evident with how well IE7 manages RSS feeds. I’ve said before that the browser handles this better then Firefox, but what’s really impressive is how damn simple it is to use. Take my father for example. He doesn’t have a clue what RSS is, let alone how to “get one” (as he puts it). Within minutes of my installing it (though, in beta form) on his laptop, he was preaching to me about what it does and had already set himself up to monitor feeds from his favorite sites.

Keeping with the example of my father, the tabs are another really strong point for those who’ve never used a SDI (single document interface) browser before. When I tried to explain to him the advantage of using tabs over loading new windows with Firefox as the example, it really went over his head. While the tabs are generally easy to figure out for “mid-level” users, those new or inexperienced ones tell a different story. Many complain about not knowing how to use them, open up a new one, closing an old one, etc. It didn’t take my father more then a minute to figure all of this out with IE7. It really blew me away how quickly he picked up this implementation over Firefox’s. Now, what I think really helped was the help window. See, when you create a new tab in IE7, you get a default page explaining what the hell tabs are written in easy to understand language.

At the same time, however, a power user such as myself finds that it is yet again, a typically Microsoft product. Features such as sidebars or extremely customizable interface elements are either extremely well hidden or completely nonexistant. Granted, MS did take a line from Firefox and create a system to allow for extensions, but as of right now, there isn’t exactly an over abundance to choose from. What’s worse (completely in my opinion), is that Microsoft’s IE7 plugin site, will eventually list both free and paid items. This has the potential to become quite annoying if all the good, popular Firefox extension are ported for cash.

So again, IE7 is clearly a Microsoft Product. It’s really well built and easy to use for the less technical or demanding, but it’s has way too many turn offs for anyone who’s been around the block. Maybe it’s just me, though. If you’ve tried it, let me know what you thought in the comments.