 |
|
|
 |
 |
Firefox 2.0 and IE7 – an overview of two new browsers. Over the last week or so there have been two new important web browser versions released that will affect the vast majority of computer users. Which one you decide to use (or if indeed if you decide to upgrade at all) could be very important. In this article, I am going to outline what has changed and what that means for the average user. Firstly, Microsoft has launched their next generation browser; Internet Explorer 7. The last version of Internet Explorer was released way back in 2001, just before Windows XP was, and has become the most popular web browser out there. Unfortunately it suffered from various problems, from being quite insecure for things like banking websites to not following the web standards for rendering web pages. Developers have had to perform certain ‘hacks’ to get pages to work correctly across different platforms. With the introduction of IE7, many of these issues have been addressed, most notably how the code that makes up a site is displayed, so hopefully as a web designer I will no longer have to find work a rounds in order to make my sites work in different browsers. However, as a user, you will not be particularly interested in how browsers translate the code of web sites to the screen, but more likely be interested in how easy the browser is to use and how safe your online experience will be using it. Microsoft is planning on rolling out IE7 to all users of Windows XP with Service pack2 installed in the next week or so. This might be seen as a good thing, but because of the changes to the program many people may be confused when it has installed. The main interface of IE7 is very different to what people are used to, and you may find it harder at first to find your way around. To make it easier, here is a brief guide to the main things that have changed. When you load IE7 for the first time, you will be presented with this screen.
As you can see, there is no menu bar and the icons seem t have moved and changed. This confused me when I first loaded it up and took a while for me to find where I was. I’ll now look at the tool bar more closely to help you find the things you need. Firstly, if you want to get the menu bar back, do the following: Click on the arrow next to the tools icon in the bottom right hand side of the toolbar, and the drop down list that will appear will have a ‘Menu Bar’ entry. Click this and your menu bar should be restored. In this bottom right area of the toolbar is where most of your icons have been moved. They are much smaller than previously, thus more difficult to find at first. Once you have found them however they should be pretty self explanatory. The biggest change for the user in IE7 is the introduction of ‘tabbed browsing’, something that has been around for quite a while in other browsers. Basically, what tabbed browsing does is let you have more than one site open in a single window. Previously Internet Explorer users needed to have a separate window open for each page they were looking at, and this cluttered the task bar at the bottom of your screen up, making it more difficult to switch between pages. IE7, always has at least two tabs open, so it is simply a matter of clicking on the unused tab to be able to use it
As you can see, very easy to find your way around, and the logos of the site also simplifies things. Another big feature that Microsoft have introduced in IE7 is the ‘Phishing detection’. Phishing websites are ones that pretend to be one thing (normally banking or ebay sites), but are in fact there to get your details and use them for identity theft. This has been a growing trend of recent years, and finally the IT companies are doing something proactively to try to stamp it out. IE7 will check sites you visit (normally you visit phishing sites from email links – the ones that tell you to confirm your password for your online banking for example), and report back to you if it knows it is a suspect site. On installation, you will be asked if you want anti-phishing turned on, and while this seems very sensible it can slow down your internet browsing. This is because it will send any page you want to see to it’s servers to check if it is known or not. If you decide to turn the system off, you can still check any suspect sites by clicking the These are the most important changes in IE7 for the home user. Yes there have been many other things that have been changed, but most of them are technical and not really relevant here. The second ‘new’ browser version to be released is Firefox 2. Although many are saying they released it when they did because IE7 was released, Mozilla, the company behind Firefox, have denied this and said it is just a coincidence. Firefox is fast becoming a very serious competitor to IE7, with around 28.8% of the market share as opposed to 54.5% of people using IE6 (figures for October 2006 taken from http://www.w3schools.com On the surface of things, not much seems to have changed in Firefox 2, and the interface is pretty much the same apart from some new icons. However under the hood of the program there have been some pretty big changes. Firstly, the anti phishing idea that was discussed earlier has also been introduced, but unlike Microsoft, sites to be checked do not have to be sent to Mozilla. There is actually a file that installs as part of the browser and updates itself that contains known phishing sites, so all the checking is done on your computer rather than remotely, so speeding up browsing. Another useful tool in Firefox is the inline spell checker. Using this, we should have no excuse for spelling mistakes on the Languedoc page!! It works basically like any word processing applications spell check and gives a red squiggly line over any word it doesn’t know, right click it and you will be presented with a choice of correct spellings, or the opportunity to add it to the dictionary. A very useful tool in my opinion. One of the other big plusses for firefox is its extensions or add-ons. People all over the world are writing little programs that plug-in to firefox so you can get things like the weather direct in the browser. IE does have some support for this too, but nowhere as near as much as Firefox. Firefox addons can be found at: https://addons.mozilla.org/ Hopefully this has been useful for you so that you can choose whether to upgrade or not, or even switch browsers all together. There are many other things that have changed in both browsers, but the ones outlined above are probably the most important ones for the average user. On a final note, IE7 is only available for Windows, it will not work on Macs or Linux, and Microsoft have no plans for this to happen (in fact Microsoft stopped development on IE for Mac a few years ago). Firefox on the other hand is available for all of them, although Mac users have an extremely good browser in Safari (which is the only one that passes all the tests on web standards). To see how different browsers perform on web standards, have a look at http://www.webstandards.org
Until next time. Richard
|
icon at the bottom of the screen and choosing ‘Check this website’. |
||
 |
||
|
||
|
 URL site map |
About us |
| Save to : |
