QuickLooks - One More Week with Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

One more week with IE7 and Firefox. Some issues fixed (or at least, root cause found) and new issues discovered. Read on.

You may recall last week I indicated I had rendering issues with IE7 and certain sites, such as News.com. I discovered the solution myself, after trying a variety of things. I thought, since the issue appeared to be that the third column on News.com was wrapping too soon, it may be an issue with font size. But changing that didn’t work. Then I remembered that when I first got my XPS Gen 2 I was told to modify the fonts if I wanted to use the laptop in non-native mode resolutions I would have to use a Font Scaling Utility. I couldn’t remember if I had ever tried that, but I downloaded it, ran it … and set fonts AND icons to normal. Voila. Everything on News.com displays fine now.

So that was sorta user error (OK, it was), but I’m sure a lot of people have used this utility and Microsoft should be aware of it. Or at least they are now. I emailed the contacts who had been trying to help me with my IE7 issues and let them no. I kinda expected a “Thanks” or SOMETHING, but never heard back. Well, You’re Welcome anyway. Meanwhile I still have the issues with Maxthon and Avant Browser, as well as IETab, all crashing on one PC (not the XPS Gen 2) since I’ve installed IE7.

At this point IT at my work indicated no one should install IE7. Now, I know several other people besides me have already. I decided I’d take the safe route and uninstall IE7. That was a mistake. After that Internet Explorer wouldn’t run at all. Nor would Maxthon. But Avant Browser would (weird). Apparently the uninstall didn’t quite work correctly, though I had successfully uninstalled IE7 on my other PC. So I reinstalled it. Heavy sigh.

Meanwhile, I’ve found I hate the following things about IE7 …

a) Menu bar BELOW the Address bar. I found a registry hack that changes this but it also moves toolbars such as Roboform above the Address bar. Even worse.
b) Scrolling tabs if they cannot all fit on the Tab bar. I FAR prefer the multi-line Tab bar of Avant Browser and Firefox (with Tab Mix Plus installed). I generally browse with many tabs open because of my news posting and blogging so this is a real annoyance for me.
c) I prefer closing tabs with a double click, not having to AIM for a close button. This is available in Maxthon, Avant Browser and Firefox (once again with TMP installed). Come on, Microsoft, get with the times.
d) No way to remove the search bar. I use Roboform, so it wastes screen space. Once again, come on Microsoft, make things configurable.

BTW, I haven’t mentioned Firefox at all. That’s because I’ve found very little negative to write about. I found one website with rendering issues … and that site rendered OK with IE7. Then again I found plenty of sites that gave me problems with IE7. I must admit I find the UI design of IE7 more appealing as it’s somewhat more modern, but Firefox is much more configurable and has many more extensions or add-ons.

All these niggling IE7 issues plus the reliability of Firefox … for now, I’m still recommending Firefox. More to come.