Well, I downloaded it. Not because I was needing it, as I use Opera, and it works great. I am looking forward to the next revision of it, 9.50 - Kestrel, because I know it will be better than Opera 9.23. Each revision of Opera gets better, and that group of developers has not put out a stinker yet.

I installed Internet Explorer 7, as I was told that the changed files would help Windows Live Writer work better. Well, it seems to - so far. Is IE 7 better? No way. I thought it just might be better since I had not used it in quite some time, and I have read about the changes that are happening - almost as we speak. The revision that was made available yesterday has changed in minor revision today when I set it up. Also the setup took a major amount of time, even on a speedy dual core computer, with fast hard drives and plenty of memory. Lots of files were changed.

IE 7 does allow a choice of default search - nice, but really no credit to Microsoft, it merely complied with a decision that was going to come, alleviating some grief for itself. The speed is not that bad, but subjectively no better than IE 6. What I did notice is that the ability to change the way toolbars are displayed, and then lock it in, is broken. What is the point of this? Why include a feature, and then have it not work?

The look is probably a take it or leave it for most - for me, I’ll leave it, as most every place I need visit works well with Opera, save for those Microsoft sites that rely on the quirks of the non-conforming browsers from Redmond. (I wonder if this is why the statistics that Microsoft quotes are different than those quoted by third parties on the use of IE, in any revision, versus any other browser. I know I use IE only when accessing those MS sites, yet nowhere else do I use IE. One of those things that make you go hmmmm.)

Oh, well, there is talk of IE 8 - maybe the toolbar lock will be fixed by then.

Tags: internet explorer 7, microsoft, non-conforming architecture, broken features, ie 8