Wednesday, February 01, 2006
IE7 Beta 2 Preview Review
Yesterday Microsoft released a public preview beta of Internet Explorer 7. It is nice and simple, but everything has moved and it is a very non-standard UI. I have never used Netscape 8, but the new layout reminds me a lot of the screenshots of NS 8 I have seen.
Every major browser I have tried has the stop and reload buttons next to the forward and back buttons. They make sense there. Things that are going to be used frequently should be in a single place that is easy to find. In this beta of IE 7 the reload button and the stop button shift over to the end of the URL bar. But that isn't the edge of the screen, there you have a dropdown search like Opera and Firefox. That is a good place for the search bar, but makes hitting the reload and stop buttons awkward. What is convenient about this placement is the Go button that I always disable finally has a place that doesn't bother me, before a page is loaded it takes the place of the reload button.
The thing that is most strange is the menu bar being missing. It really isn't any loss since everything in there can be accessed by the new buttons, but they are going to take a lot of getting used to. They also take up a lot of the tab bar. There is an option for a classic menu, but by placing it below the URL bar I just can't stand it.
I like that when you hover a tab you not only see the page title, but the address. But I think they need to truncate the address at some point. There is room since it can display from one side of the screen to the other, but addresses with lots of parameters looks bad taking up the entire width of the screen and likely get truncated anyway if they are that long.
I also like the new floating Favorite, Feed, History sidebar. That is a big improvement for screen realestate. Often I see users with that bar open all the time to either History or Favorites even in Firefox. Now that it collapses when you are done it is much nicer. It can be pinned open like before, but this is a great default.
They have added a Phishing Filter similar to the Google Safe Browsing extension for Firefox. I don't really know how well either works, I don't normally stumble into phishing pages so I have yet to see the Google extension warn me of anything except their test page. But in theory this is a great improvement that hopefully will make people less likely to fall for scams. But will these filters make people more likely to fall for scams that sneak through? I would say yes, except that most people that would fall for these attacks now don't know what to look for and would have been fooled anyway. So some protection is better than none.
I found a few rendering bugs without really trying:
I like the way IE handles the tab close button. They only show it on the active tab and it is grey until you hover your cursor over it so it is not distracting. I never used the close button at the end of the tab bar in Firefox anyway, I always middle click (or double click) and middle clicking also works in IE 7. Firefox developers are experimenting with tab close buttons too, I hope they take a good look at what MS did.
Next is feature already in IE that I just realized, the right click context menu has a big improvement for inexperienced mouse users over Firefox. I have watched older people who just can't get the difference between right and left mouse buttons. By right clicking in Firefox and blindly choosing the first option you open a new window for every link clicked. That makes the back button useless and ends up using a ton of memory. IE's first option opens in the current window/tab. I and many others would probably not like if FF changed the context menu, but the usability improvements that would be for some users would be worth it.
There apparently have been a bunch of CSS fixes which is good. This should really help cross browser site design, but I am sure we will still have to work around many things and of course still support IE 6 for a good while. The best page rendering fix I noticed was that PNG alpha transparency finally works without any hacks. I don't normally use IE so it is hard to tell, but it seemed faster. It certainly was faster than Firefox.
When programs all start coming up with unique interface layouts, users are going to suffer. It may be true that usability tests show the new interface is easier to use, but if every program comes up with their own better way, users will be constantly confused how things are organized. Firefox developers need to keep this in mind too. So far they mostly have made good decisions, but now with what Microsoft has done and their constant strive for a simpler browser I fear they will head in this direction too.
Update: Ted Drake has a post with a bit more detail of the CSS improvements. He also points out that you should realize what you are doing if you install this beta. You are replacing IE 6. Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong, you should be able to uninstall it if necessary. But this is a beta version and you never know.
Update March 27: The second public preview was released recently and all the specific page layout issues I mentioned above are solved. But I did notice another issue with MediaWiki, the login bar at the top of the page is not placed correctly, normally it is on the right, with IE7 it is on the left under the site logo. Since this release is supposed to be layout complete, I guess MediaWiki developers will have to work around this minor problem.
Every major browser I have tried has the stop and reload buttons next to the forward and back buttons. They make sense there. Things that are going to be used frequently should be in a single place that is easy to find. In this beta of IE 7 the reload button and the stop button shift over to the end of the URL bar. But that isn't the edge of the screen, there you have a dropdown search like Opera and Firefox. That is a good place for the search bar, but makes hitting the reload and stop buttons awkward. What is convenient about this placement is the Go button that I always disable finally has a place that doesn't bother me, before a page is loaded it takes the place of the reload button.
The thing that is most strange is the menu bar being missing. It really isn't any loss since everything in there can be accessed by the new buttons, but they are going to take a lot of getting used to. They also take up a lot of the tab bar. There is an option for a classic menu, but by placing it below the URL bar I just can't stand it.
I like that when you hover a tab you not only see the page title, but the address. But I think they need to truncate the address at some point. There is room since it can display from one side of the screen to the other, but addresses with lots of parameters looks bad taking up the entire width of the screen and likely get truncated anyway if they are that long.
I also like the new floating Favorite, Feed, History sidebar. That is a big improvement for screen realestate. Often I see users with that bar open all the time to either History or Favorites even in Firefox. Now that it collapses when you are done it is much nicer. It can be pinned open like before, but this is a great default.
They have added a Phishing Filter similar to the Google Safe Browsing extension for Firefox. I don't really know how well either works, I don't normally stumble into phishing pages so I have yet to see the Google extension warn me of anything except their test page. But in theory this is a great improvement that hopefully will make people less likely to fall for scams. But will these filters make people more likely to fall for scams that sneak through? I would say yes, except that most people that would fall for these attacks now don't know what to look for and would have been fooled anyway. So some protection is better than none.
I found a few rendering bugs without really trying:
- Borders in Gmail are a bit messed up some of the time, but that is minor and sometimes goes away.
- Logos on MediaWiki wikis are not displayed.
- Menu tabs on POPFile’s default skin are really messed up, showing only one to a few letters per tab. Resizing the window fixes that usually till you load the next page so hopefully that will be fixed.
I like the way IE handles the tab close button. They only show it on the active tab and it is grey until you hover your cursor over it so it is not distracting. I never used the close button at the end of the tab bar in Firefox anyway, I always middle click (or double click) and middle clicking also works in IE 7. Firefox developers are experimenting with tab close buttons too, I hope they take a good look at what MS did.
Next is feature already in IE that I just realized, the right click context menu has a big improvement for inexperienced mouse users over Firefox. I have watched older people who just can't get the difference between right and left mouse buttons. By right clicking in Firefox and blindly choosing the first option you open a new window for every link clicked. That makes the back button useless and ends up using a ton of memory. IE's first option opens in the current window/tab. I and many others would probably not like if FF changed the context menu, but the usability improvements that would be for some users would be worth it.
There apparently have been a bunch of CSS fixes which is good. This should really help cross browser site design, but I am sure we will still have to work around many things and of course still support IE 6 for a good while. The best page rendering fix I noticed was that PNG alpha transparency finally works without any hacks. I don't normally use IE so it is hard to tell, but it seemed faster. It certainly was faster than Firefox.
When programs all start coming up with unique interface layouts, users are going to suffer. It may be true that usability tests show the new interface is easier to use, but if every program comes up with their own better way, users will be constantly confused how things are organized. Firefox developers need to keep this in mind too. So far they mostly have made good decisions, but now with what Microsoft has done and their constant strive for a simpler browser I fear they will head in this direction too.
Update: Ted Drake has a post with a bit more detail of the CSS improvements. He also points out that you should realize what you are doing if you install this beta. You are replacing IE 6. Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong, you should be able to uninstall it if necessary. But this is a beta version and you never know.
Update March 27: The second public preview was released recently and all the specific page layout issues I mentioned above are solved. But I did notice another issue with MediaWiki, the login bar at the top of the page is not placed correctly, normally it is on the right, with IE7 it is on the left under the site logo. Since this release is supposed to be layout complete, I guess MediaWiki developers will have to work around this minor problem.
