Microsoft Internet Explorer version 7

The new Microsoft Inter­net Explorer ver­sion 7 is some­how try­ing to catch it’s oppo­nents — what should have been a real­ity years ago is now com­ing to life. The new RC1 ver­sion of the pop­u­lar browser has become a more solid, faster, less buggy release than the pre­vi­ous one, with a real instal­la­tion pro­gram and bet­ter RSS and CSS sup­port. But is it worth installing? And more, is it any bet­ter than other already avail­able browsers?

If you already have the beta 3 ver­sion installed, you won’t imme­di­ately notice any changes. Microsoft has improved per­for­mance, sta­bil­ity, secu­rity, and appli­ca­tion com­pat­i­bil­ity — all fea­tures that won’t come out at first. The Red­mond com­pany has also added foreign-​language sup­port, and now pro­vides an auto­matic removal of pre­vi­ous IE 7 builds.

That said, IE 7 RC1 still has that after­taste of a pro­gram in devel­op­ment, which in the Zone-H’s view won’t dis­ap­pear months after the final release, still expected some­time before the end of 2006.

Smooth install?
Although many other testers reported the install pro­ce­dure went smoothly, that was not Zone-H’s expe­ri­ence. OK, we fol­lowed the advice and closed all run­ning pro­grams and also turned-​off the antivirus pro­tec­tion dur­ing the install, which is quite an unusual require­ment for an Inter­net browser installation.

The first part went smoothly but after the reboot, which is also not com­mon by other browser instal­la­tions that are sim­ply “down­load and use”, the sys­tem returned an error that Win­dows Explorer could not start because Normaliz.dll couldn’t be found?#! All we could see was the blue back­ground of the desk­top, with no start menu, no icons — noth­ing. Just the mouse cur­sor and key­board func­tioned normally. 

After we fig­ured out, that Task Man­ager also worked, we tried to run Explorer from there, but the same error appeared. The next move was to restart the sys­tem in Safe mode, but the prob­lem couldn’t be solved there — still the same error.

After some think­ing and “Googling” (thank God we had Fire­fox installed) we found that by sim­ply down­load­ing the .dll file from the Inter­net and copy­ing it in the system32 folder should solve the proble. And it did, so now we had a work­ing sys­tem with IE 7 RC1 installed and ready for testing.

New (already seen) fea­tures
The clean and spare IE7 inter­face is essen­tially unchanged from the Beta 2 pre­view released in Feb­ru­ary. By effi­ciently mix­ing but­tons and menus in a sin­gle com­mand bar that shares a row with the tab bar, IE7’s page lay­out pro­vides a bit more room than IE6 or Fire­fox for view­ing the con­tents of the cur­rent page.

The tra­di­tional top-​level menu is hid­den in a default instal­la­tion (it reap­pears tem­porar­ily with a tap of the Alt key). The stan­dard tool­bar van­ishes too, shrink­ing to a much smaller and more com­pact set of buttons.

One thing that might bother you is that you can­not move the Menu bar back to the top, like in IE6, but that’s more a ques­tion of get­ting used to the new layout.

As for fea­tures, much has already been writ­ten about the tab­bing capa­bil­i­ties within IE 7, and RC1 intro­duces noth­ing new here. IE 7 RC1 lets you move the tabs as you can within Fire­fox.

Microsoft has also added the abil­ity to visu­ally dis­play all open tabs but in a sep­a­rate page, not via a mouseover, as you can within Opera. One advan­tage of com­ing in late to the tabbed brows­ing party, as Inter­net Explorer has, is that you get to improve on the ideas of those who’ve gone before you.

IE7’s con­trols for open­ing, clos­ing, and man­ag­ing tabbed win­dows are notice­ably sim­pler than those in Fire­fox, with a but­ton on the tab bar to open a new win­dow and a red X to close the active Web page. If many tabs are open, IE7 pro­vides a much eas­ier way to man­age them. By click­ing the Quick Tabs but­ton at the left of the tab bar you can see a thumb­nail view of all open tabs. From this win­dow, you can close any tab you no longer need to keep open and then switch to a new active tab with a sin­gle click. Out of the box, clos­ing a Fire­fox tab is a poten­tially awk­ward two-​click oper­a­tion — one click to select the tab, and a sec­ond click on the red X at the far right of the tab bar. The process is so annoy­ing that most Fire­fox experts quickly install a tab-​browsing exten­sion.

Another fea­ture bor­rowed from Opera this time is zoom. You can wheel in or wheel out on a page just by using the CTRL key and the mouse wheel, which is per­fect for those with weak eye vision, or you can use the but­ton in the lower-​right cor­ner of the browser win­dow, which zooms the entire page — graph­ics and text — from 10% to a max­i­mum of 1000%.

The new Favorites Cen­ter in IE7 com­bines the Favorites menu and the Explorer Bar in a sin­gle drop-​down list that can be pinned to the left side of the browser win­dow and now also embeds the RSS Feeds and the His­tory tab (see above picture).

Print­ing is smarter, shrink­ing pages to fit on a sin­gle sheet of paper and offer­ing a use­ful pre­view. Now you won’t lose the con­tent on the far right side of the page. The text may be smaller, but com­plete. You also have the abil­ity to print only a high­lighted sec­tion of a Web page. A new fea­ture within IE 7 adds an address bar to every pop-​up win­dow, allow­ing you to deter­mine whether you want to view that con­tent (adver­tis­ing, for example).

And although, Fire­fox and Opera have offered the One Click Cleanup of cook­ies, browser cached items, and tem­po­rary files for years, Microsoft has finally made it easy for any­one to delete their browser his­tory and per­sonal infor­ma­tion with sin­gle click.

Con­tin­u­ing within this release can­di­date is a com­plete Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion (RSS) sub­struc­ture (hence, the rea­son for the reboot when you install the new IE 7 build). New RSS feeds auto­mat­i­cally ren­der as a fairly basic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of all the cur­rent feeds for that page, plus any cat­e­go­riz­ing the site has done regard­ing spe­cific top­ics. Fire­fox has offered the capa­bil­ity to turn RSS feeds into Live Book­marks since ver­sion 1.0. Click­ing a Live Book­mark icon from the Book­marks menu dis­plays a list of the head­lines avail­able from the selected feed. That’s fine for a feed with punchy, descrip­tive head­lines. It’s a ter­ri­bly inef­fi­cient way to read information-​rich feeds, how­ever, espe­cially those that are packed with graph­ics and full text.

By con­trast, IE7’s imple­men­ta­tion of RSS feeds is sim­ple and ele­gant. When you click on a link that leads to an RSS feed, the feed’s con­tents dis­play in a spe­cially for­mat­ted page within the browser. A box at the top of the page pro­vides details about the feed and offers a link to sub­scribe to it. The box on the right side of the page lets you fil­ter the list by enter­ing search terms or click­ing cat­e­gory names, which are auto­mat­i­cally extracted from the feed.

Best of all, the RSS store is a sys­tem ser­vice that other appli­ca­tions can share. For instance, Out­look 2007, now in beta test­ing and sched­uled for release with the rest of Office 2007 later this year, can share RSS sub­scrip­tions and down­loaded items with IE7, so that you can sub­scribe to a feed in either pro­gram and view the same feed in a browser win­dow or along­side e-​mail mes­sages. News­Ga­tor, which sells RSS read­ers for vir­tu­ally every oper­at­ing sys­tem, has already announced its inten­tion to sup­port IE7’s sync features.

Web stan­dards — still an issue
Web devel­op­ers have heaped scorn on IE6 over the years, and with good rea­son. Build­ing a Web site that works well with mod­ern browsers and IE6 requires mem­o­riz­ing an ency­clo­pe­dia of hacks and workarounds. IE7 promises to fix many of the most crit­i­cal bugs and do a bet­ter job at fol­low­ing Web stan­dards. Well, if you just have a look at Zone-​H page you see, that it still has some prob­lems with ren­der­ing cor­rectly the page. And you see it has some more prob­lems run­ing the Acid2 Browser Test — where also Fire­fox fails (in a less crit­i­cal way, but still).

Secu­rity
Since its intro­duc­tion, the most pow­er­ful argu­ment in favor of switch­ing to Fire­fox has been the promise that it’s more secure and less vul­ner­a­ble than IE to infes­ta­tions of spy­ware, viruses, and other forms of mal­ware. Tech­ni­cally, at least, IE7 should level the play­ing field a bit.

IE7 has also raised its own secu­rity, with a default Medium-​High set­ting on its secu­rity zone. If you ever need to lower the secu­rity zone set­tings, to maybe install a down­loaded soft­ware, you’ll see a golden bar across the top of the screen, remind­ing you that you are now surf­ing under less secure set­tings. You can use a one-​click menu option to change the zone set­tings back. Microsoft has also neutered all but the most essen­tial ActiveX Con­trols. If you need more, you’ll be asked to acti­vate them on one by one, depend­ing on the need. This should limit hacker attacks within the browser.

IE7 upgrade is free for Win­dows XP and Win­dows 2003 Servers. By con­trast, the new browser code is built into Win­dows Vista, which is due to be deliv­ered to cor­po­rate cus­tomers at the end of this year and to the retail chan­nel in Jan­u­ary 2007. The Vista ver­sion of IE7 incor­po­rates the same secu­rity improve­ments as its XP coun­ter­part, but adds Pro­tected Mode brows­ing, in which even trusted add-​ons are quar­an­tined and given write access only to a set of vir­tu­al­ized fold­ers. This fea­ture, com­bined with Win­dows Vista’s strict User Account Con­trol, should make it much tougher for mal­ware to sneak onto a sys­tem. Despite that, with this release the browser still lacks imu­nity to Cross SIte Script­ing, at least accord­ing to the test Zone-​H ran on Scanit browser test site — which in our oppin­ion will be taken care of till the final version.

To increase secu­rity, Microsoft has signed an agree­ment with Dig­i­tal Resolve to pro­tect users from fraud­u­lent phish­ing web­sites by pro­vid­ing data feeds from Dig­i­tal Resolve’s Trusted ServerTM Tech­nol­ogy. These new feeds will help pro­vide real-​time, front-​line pro­tec­tion for con­sumers against phish­ing attacks. Microsoft’s phish­ing fil­ter will be avail­able through the Win­dows Live Tool­bar, Inter­net Explorer (IE) 7 for Win­dows XP Ser­vice Pack 2 and next gen­er­a­tion oper­at­ing sys­tem Win­dows Vista.

The new data feed sup­plied to Microsoft as part of this new agree­ment comes from Dig­i­tal Resolve’s Trusted Server Tech­nol­ogy which pro­vides con­sumers with real-​time, pos­i­tive assur­ance that they are at a valid web­site. The tech­nol­ogy uti­lizes patented data min­ing capa­bil­i­ties, which were devel­oped in 1999 as the core build­ing com­po­nent of the company’s patented IP Intel­li­gence tech­nol­ogy, to crawl the Inter­net 24 x 7, ver­i­fy­ing the authen­tic­ity of finan­cial ser­vices and e-​commerce web­sites. This infor­ma­tion is con­stantly mon­i­tored and updated within Trusted Server, which can be fed to web browsers and other desk­top appli­ca­tions to safe­guard con­sumers against rogue web­sites and pro­tect the brand of legit­i­mate online businesses.

Phish­ing attacks are now using more advanced social engi­neer­ing tech­niques and three quar­ters of of them tar­get users of Pay­Pal and eBay, accord­ing to a late July study from anti-​virus ven­dor Sophos.

Con­clu­sions
Unlike many auto­matic updates, with IE 7, Microsoft decided to give users the choice whether or not to install the update. If you’ve held off upgrad­ing, now may be the time to make your move, because this ver­sion seems solid enough to be usable for every­day needs. Despite the sig­nif­i­cant inter­face changes, this ver­sion of IE feels famil­iar, and it’s easy to accom­plish com­mon tasks. All in all, it’s a cleaner look than Fire­fox and eas­ier to nav­i­gate for every­day tasks, but the dif­fer­ence is hardly enough to make it worth switch­ing. On a straight, feature-​for-​feature com­par­i­son, IE7 stacks up well against Fire­fox. If its improved secu­rity model lives up to its design specs and mal­ware dis­trib­u­tors will find it much more dif­fi­cult to make a dis­hon­est living.

The biggest hur­dle that Inter­net Explorer has to over­come, how­ever, is its tat­tered rep­u­ta­tion — espe­cially when it comes to secu­rity — which has cre­ated an indeli­ble neg­a­tive impres­sion among the users who’ve adopted Fire­fox so far. Even if the final release of IE7 improves might­ily over the cur­rent RC1 release, regain­ing back users’ con­fi­dence, will be a long, bumpy road.