Downtime woes and Internet Explorer 7.0 is out!
Unfortunately, some problems with the databases at our hosting company put us out of action for a couple of days over the weekend, for which, we apologise. BUT, we are back now, and with a vengeance and hopefully the problems we experienced were just a one off and it won’t happen to us again.
Fingers crossed!
Internet Explorer 7.0 now available for public download
Some of you may have noticed already that the latest version of Internet Explorer is now out, and has been available for public download since Thursday last week. For those ‘dyed in the wool’ Internet Explorer users, this is a significant improvement over 6.0, offering many new features and security enhancements and you should try to upgrade to 7 as soon as you can.
Of course, those of you who’ve been following along with our series on Firefox (starting with Firefox 101 - Web browsing made better) have already seen the light and have already jumped ship!
So, is IE 7.0 worth the switch back? Hmmm…probably not. Many have remarked that IE 7.0 is just like Firefox in different clothing, and that’s the way I feel about it.
For IE users, who haven’t yet switched, its a slightly different story. Do you switch to Firefox or just upgrade to IE 7.0? Difficult question, but you should do one or the other sooner, rather than later.
New features in IE 7.0
IE 7.0 either matches, or surpasses, many of the features that we’ve come to know and love about Firefox:
- Tabbed browsing - including tabbed groups (a neat feature whereby you click on the tab group to see an ‘at-a-glance’ miniaturised view of each of your open tabs)
- Support for RSS feeds - in this respect it’s a lot better than Firefox offering the full text, rather than just the titles of the articles/stories
- Huge improvements to printing support
- Built-in search box
- Internet Explorer add-ons - much like Firefox extensions
- Improvements to security - including anti-phishing filters which helps to let you know whether a website you are visiting is genuine or not
- Re-designed interface - this felt a little weird for me, but I’ll get over it…
- ClearType text switched on by default - this smooths some of the fonts that have traditionally looked ugly in Internet Explorer in the past. It makes text look great on LCD (flat, slimline) monitors, but can look a little bit blurry on older style CRT (big, bulky) monitors
IE 7.0 is scheduled to be rolled out to all Windows machines (except those in corporate environments), as a ‘high priority’ update using Windows’ Automatic Update tools, so if you feel uncomfortable installing and downloading applications, you might want to sit back and wait for that to happen, which should happen soon enough.
This significant IE upgrade gets Microsoft back into the browser wars and it should be a very interesting battle from here on in.
The Mozilla Foundation is ready to counter the new kid on the block, with Firefox 2.0, rumored to be released this coming Tuesday…
UPDATE (25 Oct 06): Firefox 2.0 has now been released…
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