Caffeinated Dreams

So, earlier today I downloaded and installed Internet Explorer 7 on the unused Windows box. Just to see how well it does with things such as CSS, how it works, etc.

Good lord, the UI is an abortion of design. It’s like they threw in buttons wherever they wanted at the last possible second. I tried customizing the toolbars and buttons, but never achieved something that wasn’t confusing. No big deal for me, since I use keyboard shortcuts. They were nearly identical to Firefox and Konqueror so it was a breeze for me to navigate that way. Middle clicking on my mouse opened links in new tabs, etc.

One thing I liked is the quick tab tool, which is identical to an extension for Firefox and (I believe?) something Safari does. Only it runs a lot better in IE7 than the FF extension.

So how did it fair up to the Acid Test?

Horribly.

Granted, most browsers don’t pass it (Konqueror almost does, and I believe Safari does as well, both KHTML browsers), but most also don’t mutilate it like that. I was expecting a lot better than this… it is beta, so I keep telling myself web standards might be the last on their checklist. I really hope they improve this.