Diary of a Wolfeman

And you shouldn’t ask it to come in.

Ok, that is a pretty fast opinion. I installed it last night and gave it a quick trial – literally less than ten minutes. I only gave it that long because that’s all it took for me to realize it sucked.

First and worst is the layout. Yay, they got tabs – but they put a row of buttons in the tab bar that can’t be moved elsewhere. It can be slid to the right to hide it, but it includes the “Home” button, so at least one button will always be there taking up tab space. The rest of the directional controls are spread out across the toolbars, and you can’t move any of them either.

Some might say this is a bold move, but it seems pretty stupid to me. Any device or piece of software should have all of the navigational controls in one spot. Look at your tape or CD deck – Stop, Play, FFWD and REW are all right next to each other. Why should my browser have Forward and Back in the top left, Refresh and Stop between the Address and Search boxes where the Go button should be, and Home on the tab bar?

Let’s get back to those tabs again. Yes, they have them, and you can even save a collection of tabs into a bookmarks folder. Cool. The problem they still have though, is that you can’t open more than one bookmark at a time still. One of the most-used features on my Firefox install is the “Open In Tabs” extension. How could they have missed this?

Speaking of extensions, there is a selection of them for download – although I can’t imagine a real use for any of ’em. Oh – and not all of them are free. Yep – you could pay up to $30 for a freaking browser extension! Gaah! Ok, that is actually a misnomer – these are not fast-and-light browser extensions like you find in Firefox and Mozilla. These are stand-alone programs, most of which display information to a toolbar or sidebar in your browser.

Top the whole thing off with the fact that someone found a security flaw less than 24 hours after releasing the product, and I highly recommend you avoid IE7 for at least a couple months.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.