Some Internet Explorer 7 Tweaks
Also see Quero Toolbar Review, now on its own page, for additional improvements to Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7.
Introduction
It has been awhile since I last worked on this page. I will present Internet Explorer, as it arrives and then will proceed to rework the browser with the available tweaks. I will then review the newest version of the Quero Toolbar, a free add-on developed in Austria by Viktor Krammer.
After more experience, I find that Internet Explorer is more compatible with CSS1 standards in version 7 than in version 6, but still lacks CSS2 compatibility. To rephrase that in plain English, some of the Web standards are better supported than before, but the newer standards are still not supported. So while a Web designer can get more equal treatment among the different brands of browsers if he uses the CSS1 standards, he cannot venture into the more capable CSS2 standards and see a favorable treatment of his site in a Microsoft browser. Firefox has Internet Explorer beat hands-down on that score.
Likewise, after more experience, I have become better acquainted with the new, inflexible user interface, and found how to overcome some of these design shortcomings with third-party tweaks. I have tweaked mine beyond what is available out of the box, and will go over the features in the article below.
Out of the box
When first installed, the new IE7 has no menu bar, the address bar is sitting right under the title bar and is unmovable. When a right-click reveals the menu bar can be reactivated, it sits below the address bar. The explanation I heard for this is that Windows Vista has the address bar as a part of the title bar, and therefore, the menu is below the title bar. But this ain't Windows Vista, and I do not like having my menu toyed with.
The address bar is totally rearranged too. To begin with, Back and Forward buttons are left of the address bar, with Refresh and Stop to the right of it, and left of the search box. The Home button is down on the Command Bar, and Favorites is at the other end of the tab bar from Command. All these used to be right there in a row to the left of an address bar you could put where and how you wanted. This screen shot does not show the search box, which sits to the right of the buttons at the right end of the address bar as seen here.
The Tab Bar is below the address bar. There is a little button to the right of used tabs where you can click to start a new tab. In Firefox, the Tab bar goes away when there is only one tab open, but this Tab bar is always present. Firefox does not have a button to start a new tab, or perhaps there is, and I just have not found it.
Across the bottom of the window is the Status bar, with a Zoom feature in its lower right corner. Many people have the Status bar turned off, leaving a larger space on the screen for the web site view, and never see the new zoom feature down there. Clicking on the button will cycle through a range of zooms from 100% to 125% to 150% to 100% again. An arrow to the right of this button opens a menu of choices from 50% to 400% and a custom zoom from 10% to 1000% in steps of 10%. Keyboard shortcuts (CTRL)(+) and (CTRL)(-) will increase and decrease zoom by steps of 10%, while (CTRL)(0) [zero] will return you to 100%.
It should be noted that the zoom feature will magnify the scrollbars on many sites that do not comply with the web standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium, http://w3.org/. This tends to set an upper limit on just how high one can zoom , because zooms over 400% tend to blow up the size of the scroll bars to the point that the viewing area is mostly filled with scroll bars. That is not an issue with standards-compliant sites.
Registry tweaks
Putting the Menu in its place
It was during the summer of 2006 when I was testing Release Candidate 1, when I restored the menu to a visible place under the address bar, and hit the #$#@! File menu when I meant to hit the Back button, I don't know how many times.
A Registry file can be downloaded from EnhanceIE.com to force the menu to the top and the Address bar resides below it. Another one will undo the change if you decide to restore the original placement.
It should be noted, that the menus were not updated with all of the new features, and therefore I still have to use the Page menu and the Tools menu on the Command bar to supplement the View menu and Tools menu on the menu bar.
Get Rid of the Search Box
The same site also provides a Registry file download that will remove the search box and another to restore it. If you use a third-party search engine toolbar, you don't need another one.
However, if you want to keep the IE7 search box, it is nice to know that you can set its default search engine to one of your choosing. And still, you can select another search engine from a drop-down list if you want to stray away from your chosen default.
Tabbed Browsing
Internet Explorer joins the competition in offering Tabbed Browsing. I have set mine up to always open pop-ups in a new tab, and have links from other programs open in a new tab in the current window. This way, if you are working on a page and something pops up, it opens in another tab and you can stay with the tab you are looking at (or return to it if you get taken to the new tab). You can close a tab by hitting the X to the right of the tab title on the tab bar. Each tab has an individual X exit button that becomes visible when the tab is the active view.
There is a warning dialog and confirmation prompt if you attempt to close a browser instance with more than one tab open. You can change that warning behavior by setting your preferences. The warning screen offers two options, one to not show this again, and one to have these tabs reopened the next time the browser is opened. Because I may sometimes want to return to the web sites that I have open after shutting down the browser and restarting it, I leave the warning dialog alone, by not checking the box to not show it again.
I made one change in the default tabbing behavior. Going to Tools | Internet Options, on the General tab is Tabs. Hit the Settings button, and change, "Always open pop-ups in a new window" to, "Always open pop-ups in a new tab."
This change allows me to have my menus and tools available on even those pop-ups that have no tool bars. One example site is the Amateur Radio Council of Arizona, www.arca-az.org. This site uses Javascript to disable menus and address bars and open a new browser window. I had to turn off a pop-up blocker, but the window opened in a new tab after I allowed the pop-up, as seen above.
The tab bar runs across the bottom of the toolbar display at the top of the screen, and sits directly above the web site content. At the very left are two buttons that I have yet to use, the Favorites Center and Add to Favorites. Instead I am accustomed to working through the Favorites menu at the top of the screen.
To the right of the Favorites buttons is Quick Tabs, and a tabs list dropdown menu. Then come the tabs. To the right is the new Command bar.
This page was Updated Saturday, April 14, 2007