For all the rest of us, can we get a screenshot of how they handle tab overflow?

"and they've solved the overflow problem very nicely (we should do that!) "

What overflow problem?

>What overflow problem?

If you open lots of tabs, they will start to go of the edge of the screen.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155325

Yep, I'd like to see their overflow handling method. I guess it's one of the methods that already work with Firefox using an extension. To be specific, I mean a tabbar with arrows and/or a multiline tabbar.

Could you please post a screenshot or describe how it works?

Thanks

I would like to give them credit for including Google search. Maybe you should follow and include MSN search. It's definetly better than Creative commons (I can't fully understand what it does looking for in Firefox except that I've read in the bug that you have premises in the same building or something like that :))

I've been using it for a couple of hours now and I really am surprised they released this as a Beta and not an Alpha. Considering I can't even get the Windows Update site to work on it.

I personally don't like the way they solved the overflow problem also you may notice that the close tab button doesn’t work very smoothly when lots of tabs are open. Neither do I like the way you can't customise where some of where the bars go, such as the address bar, for me it has made it impossible to lay it out how I like it.

So far all the reviews have focused on the UI. Only one article even mentions that yes the transparent png support is there, but its slow, especially over background images. So far, it seems like an echo of Dvorak's comment on Vista: "the thud heard round the world".

I personally could care less about the UI stuff. I think MS is setting up IE7 to be marginalized. I'm waiting for IE7 to be put through the standards support battery, and I bet little has changed. It is after all the same rendering core from 5.0, I think.

The rendering engine loooks like IE6 with PNG support. IE7 fails the sames CSS tests that IE6 fails.

Dracos

I also agree about not caring about the UI as I won't use it or recommend it. Dave Shea covers the CSS aspects of IE7 Beta. Which other than the png 'improvements' there appears to be very little changed in the rendering engine.
http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/07/28/ie7_css_upda/

I only saw one screenshot of it so far.

If that's the default layout, then Netscape 8 just lost its title of "most incoherent UI".

> So far all the reviews have focused on the UI.

That's because unfortunately, the UI is practically all that changed. From my day's worth of testing it here at work, the major changes are:

1) Tabs & overall UI changes. The tabbed interface itself is quite good, but suddenly making all kinds of global widgets belong to tabs is a horrible and needlessly confusing idea.

2) Proper PNG support. It's there, but that's about it. Nothing exciting whatsoever.

3) Barely-finished RSS support. All it has is feed discovery (on par with Firefox's) and in-browser feed parsing (one of the few things Firefox is missing). If you add a feed to your favourites, you just make a local link to the feed. There doesn't seem to be any kind of article fetching, caching, or updating going on, it's just a link. When you click it, you just get linked to the nicely formatted feed. Effectively, in it's current form, IE's RSS handling is no better than just reading the site you got the feed from.

4) Vague attempts at Security Stuff. BHO monitoring / removal tool exists, but I was unable to actually remove anything. Yellow-highlited address bar on secure sites is there, but again, not new. Phishing-detection tool exists, but personally I'd rather live dangerously than have Microsoft scan every site i visit.

Of these four things, the tabs and the UI changes are the most visible and most complete aspect of IE. It isn't *good*, but because it seems almost done and because it's hard to miss, it gets talked about.

Do all these things make IE worthwhile or a real contender vs Firefox? Probably not, but at least it means when I take my monthly trip into IE to update XP I can middle-click links and have it work as I expect it to.

Firefox has an overflow problem after 33 tabs open in a single window. Who uses more than that really...

Altho I do think there should be scrolling left/right arrows by default in Firefox in a future version.

@inpheaux:

I've been minimally keeping up with it, as I have very little faith that MS is suddenly going to make developers' work easier. Everything I read tells me the correct version number should be 5.7

"Everything I read tells me the correct version number should be 5.7"

How did you come up with that number? :-)

If *I* would change the API to develop for my operating system from scratch, I'd find a major version number update quite warranted for that reason alone. And they're doing a lot more changes than that; Explorer work a lot different now, and so on. Personally I find the new UI often taking attention away from other features, ending up with people with opinions like "bah, it's just XP with a new look". :-p

As for IE 7, it seems quick at switching tabs, completely different from that MSN Toolbar disaster, stable, and overall surprisingly polished for being in its first beta and coming from Microsoft. It even has unique features like anti phising, and the RSS feed discovery and address bar highlighting is good features to take from Firefox and Opera.

I've heard it's like that so spyware can't hide the address bar or otherwise hide things from the UI.

"Of these four things, the tabs and the UI changes are the most visible and most complete aspect of IE. It isn't *good*, but because it seems almost done and because it's hard to miss, it gets talked about."

Don't forget at least two long awaited CSS fixes, and the release notes speaks of more to come in CSS land.

It also, finally, allow you to set e.g. Google as your default search from the address bar, without having to dig into other setting files and the Windows registry. I only miss a way to add more searches right now as for that feature. Although there's some sort of evil pleasure in removing MSN Search and noticing you can't add it back. :-p

Grr, only part of the comment appeared. Anyway, i heard that the reason you can't customized the toolbar as much is for the reason that i gave above.

I AGREE about the tab solution. it's really nice. to be honest firefox should think about improving too. in ie it's much more visible which tab you have opened. the others are gray (in classic theme!). also the new tab button is very comfortable!!

Maybe you should follow and include MSN search

I think MSN search would be pretty pointless to add, since Google and Yahoo are pre-included already and have a much bigger user base. besides who the biggest rival of all. (microsoft) I dont like those other such engines...

"It even has unique features like anti phising"
Doesn't matter if 3 sites are phising or if Microsoft does, does it? Since there are probably more "good" sites than "bad" sites, it makes more sense to download the phising list via windows update or something and check local, instead each URL is uploaded to Mircosoft and checked there. This makes most.. or, well, some people think that this is used to create a surf profile of their users.

However, it seems that there're more IE beta testers, but noone was that kind to explain how the overflow feature works as asked. Could one please take some time and explain it, or make a screenshot?

Since IE7 doesn't actually fix anything wrong with the rendering engine (aside from sorta, kinda, almost partially fixing PNG)... perhaps the IE7 suite of CSS fixes for IE should be renamed IE8.

http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/

"However, it seems that there're more IE beta testers, but noone was that kind to explain how the overflow feature works as asked. Could one please take some time and explain it, or make a screenshot?"

After opening 16 tabs the furthest tab to the left reduces to its icon, after 17 tabs the 2nd tab to the left reduces to its icon and the tab furthest to left goes off the screen and is only viewable again once you click the icon right next to it. It's worth noting that say you have over 30 tabs open (as I do from time to time) you have to click the tab to the most left over 10 times to get to the first tab. The same to get back to the icon furthest to the right once you have the first icon open (although you can actually just open a new tab and close that).

I know I complained a bit in my first post, it is after all a beta. There are certainly some improvements but I think they need to do a lot of work on the UI before they can release it. It would also be nice if they did a lot of work on their rendering engine before calling it IE 7, at the moment it looks like it barely deserves the name IE 6.5.

Wwwwwait a minute...

I thought you have to be an MSDN subscriber to download.

So either you are an MSDN subscriber, Asa, or you got it via p2p/bitorrent (yea I know BT is a form of p2p).

Hmm... or I missed the news that its more open of a beta now...

The Mozilla Foundation develops software that runs on Microsoft platforms. It wouldn't surprise me if they had some level of MSDN subscription.

Actually, it would surprise me more if they didn't have one.

@Damian: Thanks

So if I got many tabs open and let's say I'm currently viewing one tab in the middle then I'd have some "normal" tabs left and right of the current, then the leftmost/rightmost tab is only an icon and all other tabs are hidden and need to be recovered by clicking something like an arrow.
Did I get that right?

xeen you are almost right. But by default it's the tabs to the far left that are lost, so if you have one open in the middle that isn't more than 16 tabs from the far right then you will only be missing tabs to the less.

You have to click on the tabs to the far left or the far rights to make the next tab accessible and then click on that to make the next tab accessible and so on and so forth until you get to the page you want. As well as the general inconvenience and the feeling that a clever system could have been thought of (although they haven't done for Firefox as of yet) it means a lot of web pages flash on the screen as you try and get to the page that you want which again can be a bit annoying.

Although it's worth noting that displaying so many web pages so quickly does not slow IE7 Beta 1 down at all, it opens tabs at about the same speed Firefox does.

Tab Browser UI nice? Give me a break. One mini blank tab next to the default tab (which is crappy in that if one tab, should be zero tabs) to open new tab manually? That sucks big time. It's not even tooltipped or labelled!

Also, where is the close X button on each tab? That Fx still doesn't have this is a total utter joke but neither does the 'nice' IE tabbed UI.

The new toolbar layout is obviously a merge into longhorn/vista territory and is bizarre at best. I understand the idea of placing menu items under tabs for menu items that are tab specific. That's contextual design at it's most sensible. But placing all the options there? Furthermore this is typical MS in that the options to customise are more or less useless.

I don't really see how they solve the overflow problem much better than Fx.

As for the rendering engine, same old shite. Still mis-renders 100% width tables inside a div for just one example. It must have been very painful for them to add PNG support because clearly they would have preferred not to touch the rendering engine at all.

On top of all that, Trillian mysteriously stopped working now that I've installed IE7 beta 1 and THERE IS NO UNINSTALL OPTION that I can see for IE7b1.

I like how they display RSS feeds inline with minimal styling by default. This makes RSS truckloads more accessible than in Fx.

At least they are making an effort in fighting phishing (not that I've ever had a problem with phishing) which is something that Fx is not even touching AFAIK but even Crapscape 8 has tackled.

For those thinking of installing IE7 - run the IE7 installer then, before you hit the next button, copy the files out of the temporary directory it creates. You can then cancel the installer and create the "iexplore.exe.local" file in the same directory as the new files. Running this copy of IE will give you IE7 without the install headaches!

pd: To uninstall, you need to tell Add/Remove Programs to show updates instead of just applications.

Interesting news from the horse's mouth about IE 7 standards support:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx

Wait, did you just give the IE7 beta with its bizarre UI and horribly outdated layout engine a positive review? If anything proves you're anti-Opera, this would be it.

@pd:
It's not even tooltipped or labelled!
It's a beta 1 "product" for crying-out-loud.

Also, where is the close X button on each tab? That Fx still doesn't have this is a total utter joke but neither does the 'nice' IE tabbed UI.
I take it that clicking your middle-mouse button to close a tab is too hard for you?

As for the rendering engine, same old shite. Still mis-renders 100% width tables inside a div for just one example. It must have been very painful for them to add PNG support because clearly they would have preferred not to touch the rendering engine at all.
I wonder which company they're going to buy to help them out there? lol.

On top of all that, Trillian mysteriously stopped working now that I've installed IE7 beta 1 and THERE IS NO UNINSTALL OPTION that I can see for IE7b1.
Can't blame MS here. It's not a public beta as such. You should have used a test machine instead.

At least they are making an effort in fighting phishing (not that I've ever had a problem with phishing) which is something that Fx is not even touching AFAIK but even Crapscape 8 has tackled.
Mozilla's efforts will be through Thunderbird. After all, scams start mostly through e-mail anyway.

@Luke Shingles:
Wait, did you just give the IE7 beta with its bizarre UI and horribly outdated layout engine a positive review? If anything proves you're anti-Opera, this would be it.
Oh please.

Yes, some interesting news on CSS bugfixes at the IE blog now. I wonder where all this leaves Firefox?

Even if IE7 is quickly adopted on WinXP (and eventually Vista) Firefox still has all the older Windows versions to play with. I also think Firefox's continuous innovation will keep it growing on XP too. I for one won't stop spreading the Fox anytime soon anyway.

they've solved the overflow problem very nicely (we should do that!)
Asa, lets be honest and not beat around the bush. I have one word for you:

STEAL.

Steal shamelessly. Steal only the good parts, and make them better.

There's nothing wrong with that, and MS proved that.

@pd:
To uninstall it you have to select 'Show updates' in 'Add or Remove Programs' control panel aplet. I uninstalled IE7 after playing a bit with it, cause also Windows Updated was broken, and BitComet stopped working.

@ Craig:
I take it that clicking your middle-mouse button to close a tab is too hard for you?

I've seen people adverse to using the scroll-wheel click before. It puzzles me. I figure, either they don't know about it, or their mouse ergonomics makes it difficult, or their mouse doesn't have a middle button. If there's another explaination possible, I'd like to hear it.

@ Craig:
Oh please.

I believe Luke Shingles was cracking a joke, there.

Well, how are they to know about it? (Middle-clicking.) Nowhere is it explained in the interface of Firefox, as far as I can see.

Microsoft(Monolopoly) is just trying to reel people back so they can catch them and increase their own earnings.. If anyone heard about microsoft sueing google and wanting to shut google down.. well now they have released
Microsoft's new MSN Virtual Earth Clearly a big greedy company tactic!

Off topic but I would be suprised if microsoft released a handheld game system.

As a tab-browsing fan, I can't understand the fascination with middle-clicking. As obscure as Firefox's tabs and Find-As-You-Type functions are from regular people, do we really need one more obscure function?

Sure we do, that's what separates Firefox from most other browsers... and these added features are appreciated by who ever needs them.

The benefits of tabbed browsing outway single window browser by miles. Middle clicking is that extra bit of touch..