Ironvine Search Marketing

Yesterday Oct. 19th Microsoft launched its latest version of Internet Explorer, IE7. There have been lots of radio spots, radio ads, and news articles going out to let everyone know IE7 is live. It is being touted by Microsoft as being more secure, user friendly, and full of new features including tabbed browsing, RSS reader capabilities, pop-up blocker and automatic phishing filter. The microsoft.com homepage has a 400×400 IE7 graphic to announce the launch and provide an easy link to the download section as well.

So, now everyone knows all about IE7 going live and knows where to go to download it. The question is: Should you and what issues does it have?

To answer whether you should or should not download IE7 is basically personal preference in my opinion. Developers and hard core internet techies will find it somewhat of a pain compared to the much more stable and equally powerful FireFox 2 RC3. For the casual internet user IE7 has a few more features than IE6 which keeps it up with current trends like blogging and RSS feed readers as well as general security updates.

Are there issues with IE7? Oh yeah.

I installed IE7 today, replacing the IE 7 RC2, which replaced the IE 7 RC 1 which replaced the IE 7 Beta 2 and 3. Honestly IE 7 Beta 2 and 3 have been the most stable versions of the lot.

Issue #1 - Today’s installation (#1) went in fine, then restarted my computer as goes general Microsoft installation packages. On reboot IE7 spent about 5 minutes downloading and installing updates before it would even let me into Windows. That was a bit of a frustration and pain, they could have at least warned me it would update on reboot.

Issue #2 - All my active desktop and application links have changed from opening with FireFox 2, to now open with IE7. I have my browsers specifically set to use Firefox as the default. No matter how I set them IE7 took over and stayed in control. I had to resort to going into folder options and specifically setting the URL: http and URL: https settings to use firefox.exe directly. Honestly how many people are going to know how to do that?

Issue #3 - Internet Explorer 7 likes to lock up. It has locked up on me 3 times just trying to close the browser window after general use. No special tricks or specific web page. Just in general hard application lock up. End Now. Times 3.

Issue #4 - In attempts to fix Issue #2 I uninstalled IE7 completely, which restored the system back to IE6. That actually worked well. Had to redownload IE6 security patches however. Reinstalled IE7 a little while ago. They had changed the IE7 download page so you could select your OS version now and I didn’t have to go through the secondary patching. Thanks for the mid-launch update!

So, I have my computer back to general use after about 2.5 hours of installing/fixing IE7. Firefox 2 became my browser of choice around IE 7 RC1 and so far is staying on top in my usage.