In November, Microsoft plans to make IE7 an Automatic Update to Windows XP. That means that if you have Automatic Updates configured to download automatically, the new browser will download behind the scenes and then ask for your permission to be installed. If you have Automatic Updates turned off or configured to notify you but not download automatically, you'll see an Automatic Updates screen offering to download and install IE7.
When the new browser comes knocking, should you let it in? Oh, yes.
IE7 is a considerable improvement over IE6, and with new features such as tabbed browsing, RSS support, improved security, and an integrated search box, it's well worth the upgrade. IE6 was an inferior competitor to Mozilla's Firefox, but IE7 is the equal of Firefox 1.5, and in some ways better.
That's not to say, though, that everyone will be happy with this new version of IE. If you're a power user, much as you'll welcome these new features, you can be excused if you feel that Microsoft has partially abandoned you. For while this is a far superior browser to IE6, it's also less customizable -- a disturbing trend for those who live to tweak.
Tabbed browsing
The most obvious change in IE7 is the addition of tabbed browsing, something that for inexplicable reasons, Microsoft has been avoiding for years. But the company has finally capitulated to user demand -- and it's done quite a credible job with the new feature. In fact, for basic tab usage, it has a leg up on Firefox.
IE7 gives you several ways to open a new tab, including clicking the small empty tab on the right, pressing the Ctrl key while clicking a link, clicking a link with the middle mouse button, or pressing Alt-Enter from the address bar or from search box to open the result in a new tab.
You can rearrange tabs by dragging them; to close a tab, click it and then click the X, or else click a tab with the middle mouse button.
All that is standard, garden-variety stuff, of course, but the Quick Tabs feature bests anything that ships with Firefox. (Note, however, that similar and even better features can be added to Firefox via third-party add-ons known as extensions.) Click the Quick Tabs button on the left and all your tabs will be displayed as thumbnails. Click any thumbnail to go to that tab; click the X on it to close it.
The Tab List button (just to the right of the Quick Tabs button) is also a useful way for navigating among tabs. It lists all of your tabs, with a check next to the tab that's currently live. Click one you want to visit, and you're off to the races.
There's also a great feature that lets you save a group of tabs as a Favorite, and later reopen them in one fell swoop. Why use this? You might, for example, have a group of news sites you like to visit, or sites related to a special interest, such as digital photography or opera. Open the sites, save them as a tab group, then later reopen them all at once.
To do it, click the Add to Favorites button (a green plus sign on top of a yellow star), select "Add Tab Group to Favorites," choose the Favorites folder in which you want to save a group, name the group (for example, "Tech News Sites"), and save it. Open up the group as you would any individual Favorite, and they'll all open in their own tabs.
For basic tabbed browsing, that's a pretty good starting point. But it should be just a starting point, not an end point, and here's where IE7 falls down. For example, there should be some way to re-create a previous browsing session. Let's say Windows or your browser has crashed. Now, Microsoft might not like to admit that this ever happens, but in the world that I live in, it happens all the time. You'd like to reopen IE, and re-create the browser session you had before the crash, with all the sites opened in their own tabs. There's no way to do this in IE7.
In addition, what if you accidentally close a tab, and realize that you didn't mean to close it? Wouldn't it be nice to reopen that tab to the page where you were? You can't do it in IE7.
All these tabbed features, and more, are available in Firefox 1.5 via extensions. And restoring previous browsing sessions after a crash, and reopening accidentally closed browser tabs, are built into Firefox 2.0, now in Release Candidate 3 (RC3) code. But they're not built into IE7, and given that there's not likely to be a flourishing IE7 add-on community any time soon (as I'll explain later in this review), Microsoft would do well to write these kinds of features directly into the browser.
Who threw away the menus?
It's not just tabbed browsing that makes IE7 look different from its predecessors -- the overall interface has gotten a makeover as well. Gone are the familiar text menus, banished into the ether (although as I'll explain, you can bring them back from the afterlife). In their place is a toolbar, with drop-down menus that appear when you click an icon on it.
Menu choices are logically placed beneath their icons; the Page icon, for example, drops down a menu that lets you copy and paste, send the current page by e-mail, change the text size on the page, and so on. The Tools menu, as you've probably already guessed, contains the usual miscellaneous grab-bag of tools, including managing the pop-up blocker and anti-phishing filter (more on that later), and so on. If you've installed programs that integrate into Internet Explorer, you'll most likely get to them via this menu as well.
If you're of the "real-men-and-women-use-menus-not-icons" school, you won't be pleased with these changes, but for most of us, after a bit of adjustment to this new way of working, life will go on. And if you really need to use the old-style menus, press the Alt key and they'll return from the dead. If you click anywhere on your screen, or if you press Alt again, though, they'll vanish. If you want them revived permanently, instead click the Tools icon and choose Menu bar -- they'll never go away unless you uncheck the Menu bar selection.
Finding favorites
The Favorites area has been redone in IE7. Now called the Favorites Center, it's simpler to use and more accessible than Favorites in IE6.
Click the yellow star to make the Favorites Center appear, and a pane drops down on the left side of the page. The pane is wider than the Favorites list in IE6 and has three buttons on top: one for Favorites, one for RSS feeds (more on that later), and one for your browsing history. In IE6, Favorites wasn't integrated in this way with the history list -- and, of course, there was no RSS support in IE6.
Built-in RSS support
Another big improvement in IE7 is its impressive RSS support. It outdoes the native RSS support built into Firefox via Live Bookmarks, and also bests the Firefox Sage RSS add-on. In fact, it's a sophisticated enough tool that it might make you throw away your dedicated RSS reader.
Subscribing to a feed is exceedingly simple. When you're on a site that features an RSS feed, the small RSS button on the Internet Explorer toolbar, normally gray, lights up orange. Click it and select a feed to read it, and if you decide you want to subscribe, click "Subscribe to this feed." As with Favorites, you can save feeds to folders, as a way to easily organize them.
The reader itself is integrated into the new IE Favorites Center, on the left-hand side of the screen. When you're in the Favorites Center, click Feeds, and your list of feeds and feeds folders appears. Click a folder to list all the feeds in it; click a feed to read it. There's no need to take an action to update your feeds; IE7 does it automatically.
IE7's RSS search and filtering tools are considerable. Not only can you search through the entire feed (and you do search through the whole feed, not just the latest entries you see), but you can also sort by date, title, and author. Better yet, you can filter by any categories the blog or feed has created. So, for example, if you're reading an RSS feed of a blog about Microsoft, you can filter to see only entries about Vista, Internet Explorer, and so on.
All this being said, there could be at least one improvement to its RSS capabilities. Missing is the ability to search across all your RSS feeds, not just inside a single feed. Still, this is a relatively minor quibble; this is a surprisingly powerful RSS reader, intelligently integrated directly into IE.
Search
Internet Explorer has taken a page from Firefox, and now includes a search box in the upper-right corner of the browser window. It's easy to add new providers or change your default search provider.
Click the down arrow to the right of the search box, select "Find More Providers," and you'll be able to add a number of other search engines, including Google, Wikipedia, Ask.com, various news, shopping and weather searches, and more. Your best bet is to install multiple search engines; to switch among them, click the down arrow and choose which engine to use for that particular search.
Firefox still bests IE when it comes to this feature, because it offers far more search engines for the search box than does IE. That might change over time, because it's not that difficult to create a file that will add any search engine to Internet Explorer, via the OpenSearch specification. Expect there to be more search engines added to IE in the long run.
Security
To many of us, the most important aspects of IE7 are its new interface, tabbed browsing, and RSS support. But to Microsoft, it's all about security. In fact, when asked why IE7 was going to be delivered via Automatic Updates, a senior product manager cited security as the single most important reason.
The most obvious new security feature is the anti-phishing toolbar (more on that later). But Microsoft says that there are far more security features baked into the browser than users will ever see, and that these are as important, or even more important, than the anti-phishing tool.
ActiveX has long been an IE security hole, and Microsoft has done some work in IE7 to protect against ActiveX attacks. There are hundreds of ActiveX and COM objects in Windows that in IE6 can be invoked from a Web page, without any user opt-in. Many of these are well-known -- for example, using the ActiveX version of Windows Media Player to play videos. But most are not well-known, and some of these lesser-known controls have allowed malware writers to exploit scripting vulnerabilities to attack a PC.
In IE7, several hundred of these objects are disabled by default, rather than enabled by default, as they were in IE6. So if a user visits a Web page that tries to invoke one of the objects, she'll get the familiar security warning, and she will have to actively say she wants to run the control. This increases security because a user has to opt in to run the control. And because so few people will now be vulnerable to these kinds of exploits by default, Microsoft believes that malware authors will largely stop trying to use ActiveX as a security hole. Whether that reasoning will hold up in the real world remains to be seen.
There are exceptions to the tighter opt-in rule in IE7: A handful of the most common ActiveX controls are enabled by default for the Internet Zone in a permissions library. These allowed applets -- Windows Media Player among them -- are widely used and considered to be non-malicious.
Finally, because enterprises often build in-house applications around ActiveX controls, these objects are enabled by default in IE7's Local Intranet Zone security settings.
In addition, says Microsoft, a variety of vulnerabilities have been fixed, such as a VML hole that allowed the VML vector markup language to be used to launch an attack.
With IE7, the default security level has been raised from medium, the IE6 default, to medium-high. Not only that, but there are now no lower security levels than medium -- the medium-low and low settings have been eliminated entirely.
If you lower some of your security settings, you'll get a reminder in the Information Bar that you have low security settings -- and that warning stays there forever until you change your security settings back again. There's simply no way to turn it off. Not only that, but every time that you restart your browser, you'll receive a full-screen warning that your settings are not secure.
At some point, you'll most likely give in. To restore your settings to the recommended level, click the Information Bar and select Fix Settings for Me from the menu that appears.
This is, needless to say, exceedingly annoying, and seems part and parcel of a continuing push by Microsoft to protect users from themselves, even if it means being intrusive. The much-maligned User Account Control (UAC) feature of Windows Vista is another example of this trend.
The anti-phishing tool
IE7's anti-phishing tool is a clear winner, and goes a long way toward keeping naive users safe from phishing attacks. It stops people from visiting scam Web sites masquerading as real ones -- for example, a site designed to look exactly like PayPal or a bank, but that in fact is run by a con artist who will steal passwords, user names, and more when people log in.
Go to a known phishing site, and Internet Explorer blocks you from visiting, issuing a warning that you've been steered away from a phishing site. If you visit a site that Internet Explorer believes is suspicious, it lets you visit the site, but pops up a prominent warning that this might be a phishing site.
In my decidedly unscientific sampling, the filter did a bang-up job. It blocked at least 80 percent of phishing sites I've visited -- better, in my experience, than the filter built into Firefox.
Better printing
Overlooked in all the hoopla around major new additions such as tabbed browsing, security, and RSS feeds is a humble little feature that in fact is one of the most useful changes in all of IE7 -- how it handles printing.
It's an open secret that printing Web pages is one of the all-time top Internet annoyances. How many times have you printed a page, only to find that the right-hand side of the page is cut off? IE7 fixes the problem by automatically scaling the Web page so that it always fits when it prints.
Printing has other useful new features as well. Click the Print icon in the toolbar, then select Print Preview, and you'll be able to see a preview of your printout and customize how it prints. You can choose from multiple views, from a single page at a time all the way up to a 12-page view. You can also view each page full-width or full-page, and switch between landscape and portrait modes. In addition, you can choose to print headers and footers, or leave them out entirely.
Good news for enterprises
IE7 offers some goodies for businesses as well as individual browser users. Group Policy can now be applied to all Internet Explorer features, so that network administrators can better control and standardize browser use, and more easily enforce company-wide browser configurations. And in mixed Windows XP-Windows Vista environments, Group Policy can handle both sets of clients simultaneously, making for much easier management.
Of course, not all companies will want to upgrade to IE7 right away. The new version might have conflicts with in-house applications that users access via Internet Explorer. And many businesses already have security measures in place that make upgrading to IE7 for its greater security a non-issue. For these companies, Microsoft is providing tools that can stop the automatic update to IE7 on corporate desktops.
Bad news for power users
Those who live to tweak their browsers will be disappointed by IE7. As noted before, if you change some security settings, you will be nagged from now until the end of time to change them back, and most likely you'll cry "Uncle!" at some point and give in.
In addition, the toolbar can no longer be customized. In IE6, it was a breeze to add and remove toolbar buttons and functions, change text size and placement, and so on. No can do in IE7 -- what you see is what you get.
And those who were hoping they'd get themes or skins to change the look of IE7 will be severely disappointed as well. It simply can't be done. In fact, there's precious little you can do to tweak or customize this browser; sometimes it feels as if it's locked down as much against ordinary users as it is against malware.
IE7 add-ons -- a big zero
Another area where IE7 has serious shortcomings is with add-ons that give extra features to the browser. Firefox has an incredibly rich community of developers creating extensions, and IE has nothing that comes remotely close to it. For reasons we'll get into in a minute, that's not likely to change any time soon.
How to find IE add-ons? Select Tools > Manage Add-Ons > Find More Add-Ons, or else go straight to the Add-Ons for Internet Explorer site. Unfortunately, most of the add-ons you'll find are for-pay, rather than free.
What's more, many of these so-called add-ons are not designed to work directly inside IE and integrate with the browser to give you a better browsing experience. In fact, a fair number of them have nothing really to do with IE, because they can work just as well with any competing browser, or work as standalone programs by themselves. They are nothing like the extensions that integrate into Firefox to extend that browser's functionality.
Finally, as a general rule, any add-ons that are designed to integrate into IE have not been specifically designed for IE7. That means, for instance, that as of this writing you won't find a single add-on that lets you customize the way IE7 tabs work.
Don't expect much to happen in the way of add-ons for IE7, at least for the foreseeable future. There are several reasons for this. A big one has to do with how add-ons are written. To write an add-on for Internet Explorer, you need to be a C programmer. To write an extension for Firefox, you only need to be able to write a script -- and there are far more people in the world capable of writing scripts than are capable of writing C code.
Microsoft is aware of the problem, and says that it hopes ultimately to make it possible to author add-ons via scripting. But there's no timetable for this.
Beyond that is a cultural issue. There is a sizable community of people who believe in open source as a movement and philosophy, but outside the confines of Microsoft, you won't find a similar community devoted to Microsoft as a movement and philosophy. So you don't have people with the same fervor devoted to writing IE add-ons as you have writing Firefox extensions.
Microsoft doesn't seem to be doing anything to foster an add-on movement, either. The Firefox extension site, for example, is run by the Mozilla Foundation, which plays an integral role in the open-source movement. Microsoft's add-on site, meanwhile, isn't even completely run by Microsoft itself; it's a co-branded download library powered by CNET's Download.com.
The bottom line
IE7 is a clear and dramatic improvement over IE6; with tabbed browsing, increased security, excellent RSS support, better printing, and a cleaner interface, it's a no-brainer to upgrade from IE6.
But this browser is far from perfect. Its use of tabs, for example, needs to be improved. In addition, Microsoft needs to change the way add-ons are created, so that it can foster a wider community of add-on writers as a way of building a thriving ecosystem of add-ons.
And Microsoft has to change its attitude toward the power user. Henry Ford famously said that his customers could buy a Model T "in any color, so long as it's black." Microsoft seems to have that same attitude in this version of Internet Explorer.
Microsoft officials say that the next version of Internet Explorer will be focused more on the power user. While they won't guarantee any specific features, they say it will offer more customization overall, and hope to allow for toolbar customization, the addition of themes and skins, and similar features. In fact, they say, they wanted to include those features in IE7, but simply ran out of time.
All in all, even if you're a power user, it's worth your while to upgrade to this browser for its increased security and considerable new features. Let's just hope that the next time around, you can deck out your browser in mauve polka dots if you want.