I gave Internet Explorer 7 an unusually long trial period, and ultimately decided it wasn’t for me. Why? Several reasons:

1. I like a minimal footprint on my open windows. Seriously, do you people think I have 8 million pixels on my desktop? Well, okay, I do; but my point remains: All I want is the titlebar, menus, and addressbar. I don’t want your bloated, ugly toolbar; I don’t want your useless Links PropagandaBar.

This is my titlebar in MSIE6. Notice the tiny footprint: Title, menus and address, BOOM, content. That’s all I want!

Honestly speaking, since the AddressBar supports Enter to browse, I don’t even need the ugly Go button. And what’s this flag even supposed to do?

2. I don’t use RSS. Sure, it’s a great technology; However, there are too many standards out there as to what tags to support, and some sites don’t update their RSS XML appropriately. Additionally, that’s one more window I gotta keep open, or in MSIE7 I would have to continually switch back and forth between browser and RSS views. But this blog supports RSS because there is a demand for it. Then again, there’s a demand for iPhones, so who knows…

3. IE7 consumes more resources. I noticed each window seems to consume at least 3-5MB more than IE6 windows.

4. IE7 takes longer to load than IE6. I also notice that since I reverted to IE6, my boot time is slightly faster.

5. The Escape button is supposed to stop loading! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve opened an iexplore window with a specific address in mind or in clipboard; wanting to press Escape, Alt-D, Paste, Enter. I’ve already got the keystrokes buffered at the tips of my fingers; alas, I am cock-blocked.

In IE7, the Escape button doesn’t stop loading the damn page, so I had to tell it to open new windows to a blank page, which still somehow manages to take a few seconds to load.

Furthermore, after pressing Escape and Alt-D, then proceeding to type in an address, I notice if the page does finish loading it steals keyboard focus away form the AddressBar while I’m typing. WTF?

So yeah, I’m back on IE6. You call that progress?

Edit: Comedically enough, this Entry ties into the Comcast saga. I went to add a link to UrbanDictionary for the definition of “Cock Blocked”, in case some people are somehow unfamiliar with the term. Alas, my Internet connection has dropped six times in the past four hours. Look for another Comcast post shortly.