h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My computer wants me to install Internet Explorer 7. Any reason why I shouldn't?

Hmm.

Mine won't, but that's a different issue (involving win98).

My bank won't support it as a browser for internet banking. This may be because my bank's crap, though. Do other people find this?

Generally speaking, I like it as it uses tabs (I know, Firefox/Mozilla have been doing this for years, M$ have finally caught up). Be prepared for the following things:

(i) All the icons have changed/are in different places to where you're used to.
(ii) The default option seems to be to hide the menu bar, so you need to change the display settings.
(iii) Other things it may try to install without you particularly asking it to.

RF

I actually quite like it I know i'll be shot around these parts for saying it, but due to everyone saying it i recently downloaded Firefox.... and went straight back to IE7

Firefox may have been much better than previous versions of IE, but once you get used to it, i think IE7 looks better and loads pages more smoothly than Firefox.

It also displays text *very* clearly (FF looks blurred now in comparison) and has plenty of new browser history erasing options for the paranoid/prawn lovers amongst us

Still has that bloody annoying 'click here to use this control' nonsense every time an activX thingy tries to run, though Didn't hang about with FF long enough to notice if it does that too.

I've recently downloaded Mozilla/Firefox, because so many people praise it and I wanted to know what it's all about. Result: I don't like it, graphics don't display well, text is tiny and I have to go and set it to 'large' every time I am in Firefox.
I haven't been asked to update to IE7, though, so no idea how that would display things then.

I've got Firefox, and since I've had it, I've not had my anti-virus pick up a single thing other than ads. I don't know what the security is like on IE7, but I can well remember having nasty things getting into previous versions, and having to somehow get the patches from windows.
That's why I don't use IE, simply to stay out of the way of the viruses.

If my reasons are now outdated, please tell me so.

There are never any viruses on my PC, and Spybot and Ad -Aware regularly tell me that everything is fine. I guess it depends on which sites you go to.

>I guess it depends on which sites you go to.

Well, I'm very careful about what I do online.

For instance, this morning all I've done is reply to an e-mail from a nice Nigerian man who calls me his friend, and tells me I've won a lot of money, then I've visited a Russian porn site, and finally I responded to an e-mail from my bank, who luckily warned me that I had been scammed, and I had to give them my bank-details and passwords to rectify the situation.

It downloaded itself on my friend's laptop before christmas, and brought a virus or something with it - luckily she had another browser because she couldn't get online with IE7 at all. Apparently microsoft later sent out updates and it's fine now.

my brother downloaded ie7 for me ove christmas and i hated it. ther version i had before lt me use tabbed browsing but i cant figure out how to do it on ie7. after hearing so many things about firefox i downloaded it 2 weeks ago. i find it very easy to use and i like it

I've found it's much more Microsoft Vista orientated so I expect we'll all end up with it eventually

In general, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer are very similar now. But there are irritating differences between them.

Firefox 1 couldn't use the Search function in h2g2 Edit Boxes. This is fixed in Firefox 2 and was always OK in IE.

Firefox 2 doesn't work correctly with the "My Conversations" box - it opens the new conversations in a separate tab, instead of a separate window. Since the My Conversations is in a special small window with no menu at the top, you don't get the menu functions at the top of any conversations. This is enough to prevent me from using Firefox 2. It works OK in IE 6.

Internet Explorer 6 doesn't work with the Plain Skin in h2g2: you can't select text for cutting and pasting. This is OK in Firefox.

IE 6 doesn't display many of the not-quite-standard characters correctly, such as the mathematical ones.

I think I'll try IE7.

Gnomon - with the my conversations box - if you set the link into your menu bar as a shortcut and tell Firefox to open it in the sidebar you're laughing

Thanks, Whisky. I'll try that when I get home.

Traveller in Time just recovered from a five hour session of reinstalling WindozeXP
"Actually despite my disappointments regarding IE7 as mentioned in my Journal < F124705?thread=3723128 > I have not really found bad things.

Recently been playing with IE1, that was bad "