Week in Review: That’s a Wrap (2)

Earlier this week Microsoft made public a beta for the new Internet Explorer 7.  At home I’m partial to Firefox (though I use it at work some, too).  But at work, I’m forced to use IE for my development work.  Bah!  This new version of IE is supposed to have a number of security enhancements, and it’s "killer feature" of introducing tabbed browsing to the masses.  So here’s my mini review:

First, some pictures of what it looks like:
 

The interface is quite a bit different than IE6; they’ve changed some layouts around, gone for a bit of a "minimalist" look, and moved some things so they’re more easily accessible.  The tabbed interface works, and there’s also a "summary" screen that shows smaller images of all your open tabs, so you can jump to which one you want easily.

All in all, I think it’s pretty good so far, and we’ve only found one web page at work that broke after installing it, but that was easily fixed.  It still feels like a beta, in that it doesn’t seem quite as fast or snappy as I’m used to, and it seems to eat a bit of memory when lots of tabs are open.  It’s definitely better, for IE.  But it will not be replacing my Firefox anytime soon.  I always thought that tabbed browsing was the best reason for using Firefox.  I hated having to have 4-5 browsers open when I was multitasking, especially when jumping from site to site looking something up.  But there are other features I’ve grown to depend on that even this new IE still doesn’t have.  Microsoft’s find/search on a page sucks.  Ctrl-F is nice, but I hate how the little search box stays on the screen, and I hate how you have to choose Up/Down to search. In Firefox, I hit the "/" key, a box shows at the bottom, and I search from there.  Repeatedly touching F3 cycles through all the instances of what I’m looking for on the page.  I didn’t realize how much I relied on this until I was at work looking something up.

I also missed the Adblock extension when I was playing with the new IE.  In Firefox, this blocks out all ads, ad images, flash ads, etc. on a web page.  Plus, if one gets through, you can right-click on it, and choose to block that image (or all images from that adserver) in the future.  It makes the browsing experience that much better, especially when you’re doing research and having to bounce from site to site, often with links that are laden in ad crap. 

Anyway, if you’re feeling adventurous, give IE7 a try.  It’s an improvement, offers some "new" features, but still has a way to go to beat Firefox! 

My Tivo yearning has subsided somewhat the past couple of weeks.  I discovered that our DVD player, a Philips DVP642, has the ability to play Divx files on a data disc.  I.e., I can download video files, burn them as data files onto a CD or DVD, and the DVD player plays them just fine.  Through the magic of  BitTorrent, and my favorite BT client utorrent, within a day after a TV show airs I can download it, usually in high-definition, with the commercials pre-cut.  Since we don’t usually get around to watching what we missed until a few days later, this works well.  Because BitTorrent works faster the more people are "sharing", I usually get what I’m looking for all downloaded within a day or so.  I don’t want to publicly divulge the site where I Get Stuff because of, ahem, possible other things on those sites.  But doing a google search on something like "csi s06e06 torrent" will get you started .  Just use the name you’re looking for, and then "s" and a two digit number for the season and "e" and a two digit number for the episode number.  I still want build my own, but this will work for now! 

I managed to download and play the demo for Star Wars: Empire at War earlier this week.  Very cool.  It brought back memories of Warcraft II only set in the Star Wars universe.  I think it comes out in a couple weeks – I’ll have to check it out then and hopefully the reviews are good.  The demo let you play through some tutorial missions, and they seemed awesome. 

In closing, I’m thinking of trying to come up with some "weekly" columns of sorts, just to get some different content.  Like every Monday will have this topic, Wednesdays will be that, etc.  But I need ideas.  I’ve got a few in mind, but anyone have any others?  Talkback!