Jo’s Cafe

Okay I went over to Microsoft and downloaded the IE7 Beta version.  I had to see what all the fuss was about.

As many of you know by my front page, I switched to Firefox a while back.  Mainly, it loaded the heavy graphic filled blogs that I read on a daily basis much faster.  I then fell in love with the tabbing feature.  Of course, IE7 now has tabs.  If for anything else, IE7 has made a major improvement in that area alone in my book.

The first thing I had a problem with, and this could come from NOT reading instructions, is I couldn’t find the toolbar options or my favorites.  Okay, about a minute of hunting and clicking on every icon up there, I found them. 

Then I went over to my blog.  WOW!! It looks cleaner.  The biggest issue I had with blogging and FireFox was that I not only had to create for that browser, but make the site also look good to those users that have Internet Explorer.  And may I say it is the biggest pain in my backside.  Since the site is already geared for both browsers, the only difference I can see is that IE7 loads it faster than 6 did and it looks more “professional”.  But … how is it going to handle the heavy duty blogs I visit.

My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy only loaded to the background color and then sat there thinking. 

aaron: cc (which is the heaviest graphics wise) actually loaded first, but then stalled, as usual, for a few seconds and then loaded completely.

BIG DOG’s site loaded about the same as it does in FireFox.

Finally after aaron:cc and BIG DOG loaded, MVRWC came up. 

As for working with Wordpress 2.0, there are some pros and cons as always.  When in the Write option, I wanted to change categories for this post, so I clicked on the Categories Icon + an got a “Do you want to move from this window?” pop up.  I said no, and the categories opened up just fine.  It does hold the window shape that I like for writing in better than FireFox does, and I’m going to check out the Google Spell check at the end of this post.  Since going to WP2.0, the Google spell check doesn’t work.  It’s either a WP thing, or FireFox thing with WP2.0.

Just checked it and Google Spell check from their toolbar DOES work.  So looks like I’ll be writing my posts with IE7 instead of FireFox.  I need that spellcheck option badly!

The next experiment was at Pogo.com.  I was having major issues with games not loading, crashing, etc. and when I switched to FireFox, they stopped.  The game loaded pretty quickly, but then again I am going in there when the rooms aren’t that full during the day time.  A true test will be at night when the whole planet is online.

So I’m going to experiment some more.  I’m not a “behind the code” person, I’m a user.  If it doesn’t work, give me something better or I’m going somewhere else.  So far, for me, the stolen borrowed copied feature of the tabs is the biggest pull back to IE7.