Some of you are tech-savvy, some of you less so. Thats fine :o)
What i want to tell each and every one of you about today is that Microsoft have made a new version of Internet Explorer ready and available. If you are using Windows XP you can download Internet Explorer 7 right now.
Or, if you’d rather wait, IE7 will also be coming down as an Automatic Update as part of Windows Update (the little yellow balloon in the right bottom corner that tells you updates are ready every now and then) at some point before November 1st.
I strongly urge you all to download and install this. Most of my site visitors are using Internet Explorer already (if you look at the last entry in the ‘Help’ menu of your browser and it says ‘About Internet Explorer’ then you are) so this upgrade will be pretty painless. You will download, re-install, reboot your PC and next time you use the web you’ll be using IE7. It looks a little different but all your Home page settings and Favorites are just where you left them. It also has some sparkly new features such as tabbed browsing and built in RSS feeds-reading.
Even if you don’t use IE regularly, I still recommend downloading and installing. It won’t set itself as the default browser if you use Firefox or Opera but it will mean if you ever have occassion to use IE, you’ll be using IE7.
So why do I care what browser you use?
Well, firstly, IE7 is a much more _secure_ browser. It makes surfing the web much safer than using older version of IE.
Secondly, it makes _my_ life much easier. Older versions of IE have very very bad rendering of websites, meaning that the code I and my colleagues use to build web sites doesn’t work as well as it should in IE. By switching to IE7 you’ll be helping every web developer on the face of the planet – doesn’t that give you a warm fuzzy glow? The quicker people switch to IE7, the quicker we can ditch support for old, buggy versions of IE.
Thanks for listening – once again, you can download it now or wait and get it via Automatic Update. I hope you do :o)
Left Brain Right Brain 
Thanks for the reminder. I already have it on one machine.
Do I have to? It means configuring Wine and other such things, and Konqueror and Firefox work fine for me (and render all correctly coded webpages correctly :)).
Yes sir! Downloading soon!
*I* have a Mac and Firefox (or Safari) so why the heyll would I want IE? 😛
Now, if someone can tell me how to increase the refresh rate on a machine running Windows 2000, I’d be much obliged. The monitors at the school where I work make me headachy-dizzy. They’re the student-issue computers — I don’t have one on my desk to even ask for a plasma screen.
I’m curious to see how fast uptake is going to be. I wonder what kind of penetration we’ll be looking at in a month or two…
Why not just urge users to switch to firefox?
Did you know you can now run Windows as a program on Linux? Talk about the best of both worlds!
Or, if you’re unfortunate enough to be using Windows rather than a Mac, you could just use Firefox, which is a superior browser in almost every way to anything Microsloth has produced.
Its true that the Fox is a much better browser (FF2 out soon!) but unfortunately, quite a lot of people are stuck using IE.
Orac,
It is unacceptable to crack on the Microsoft empire in my presence. The Bill Gates militia will be paying you a visit. So what if Internet Explorer crashes more than a drunk playing Gran Turismo? It integrates so well with Windows Explorer and only locks up my computer once every 24 hours.
For security reasons, I switched to FireFox…
I love Internet Explorer 7 because of the tabs and built in RSS reader. It does display websites better, and luckily, all browsers are heading in this direction.
I think I’ll wait for IE 7 Service Pack 1. Or maybe I’ll just wait for Version 8. After all it’s only been 5 years since Version 6 was released.
(Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself)
Hello All, ici Ilja,
I’m not agreeing about the statement IE7 (include IE6) is a better & saver browser. I’m sponsered by MS & a TechNet member, & part of my job is to tell MS everything what’s wrong with their systems.
On the same moment MS launched IE7 the security company Secunia.com deliberately notified that they already found a leak in IE7 (& IE6!). Here’s the link to test it Yourself:
http://secunia.com/Internet_Explorer_Arbitrary_Content_Disclosure_Vulnerability_Test
IE is also part of Windows OS & therefore it doesn’t completely comply to the html-standard.
To secure Your computer using IE You should shut off Active X (after installing IE7 it’s standard already shut off). Also keep in mind that all open websites were You have logged in, can be read by an attacker.
This includes Internet banking. To limit the damage close all pages with a login before You open an untrusted or unknown site.
It could take some time before MS patches this problem.
Ilja._\//
Well, I’m one of those guys who never upgrades or installs anything unless I absolutely have to. I have my Windows in “Classic” mode. So I resisted Kev’s advice to install IE7 till I did my new security patches and so on, when Microsoft pushed it down my throat.
Didn’t like it. Can’t see the benefit. Made a lot of fonts on my screen blurry (especially Courier faces and some other fonts, which were nowhere near as sharp as previously). Forced me to have an extra search box (presumably to help the assault on Google).
So I uninstalled it.
I had the same issue with blurry text on an LCD.
You can either fine tune, or turn the “feature” of completely with a couple of quick clicks.
See Tools > Internet Options> Advanced > Multimedia > Uncheck “Always use Clear Type for HTML*
Although IE7 doesn’t appear greatly different, there are a couple of handy features (like the zoom feature, bottom right of the explorer window).
I’m on a Mac with Firefox and no other technical skills. Is that enough?