Home & Small Office Computer Guide

In the last week or so we’ve been coming across a number of people who have been having some serious problems with Internet Explorer … and usually Internet Explorer 7.

The problem has reared it’s ugly head when users with Internet Explorer 7 have tried to log on to their Gmail account. Instead of seeing the log-in screen it seems that most of them have been seeing a blank page.

One of our clients gave us a call during breakfast on Saturday morning when he found for the third day in row he couldn’t access Gmail at all. We went round and fixed the problem in a couple of minutes.

If you’re having that problem all you have to do is uninstall Internet Explorer 7 via the Control Panel and then reboot the computer. When the computer restarts it will pick up IE6 and that version of Internet Explorer sees Gmail with no problems at all.

But is it worth downloading?

I downloaded IE 7 last night and installed it on two of my computers. The actual installation took some time because Microsoft wants to check your computer before it actually goes ahead and does anyting and that became a little tedious.

IE7 automatically imports your bookmarks and any toolbars you may use (I use the Google toolbar) but you may find that it then adds things to those toolbars and the end result can look rather clunky. I ditched McAfee SiteAdvisor on the PC that I installed IE7 on because it pushed the toolbars out of shape.

The user interface is definitely not as user-friendly as it was om IE6. Instead of a neat row of buttons and text links across the top it has a few small buttons on the right hand side of the screen that are combined with  drop-down menus.

IE7 does have tabbed browsing at last but it doesn’t seem to do it as well as Firefox does. IE7 also gives you access to various extensions - just as Firefox does - but from what I read those extensions aren’t as useful - or extensive - or as free as the extensions for Firefox are.

Security and Speed
There are some added security measures for IE7 which may or may not prove useful. One is an anti-phishing filter that scans websites before they load in the browser window. You can turn that filter on or off and I will probably end up turning it off because it certainly slows the loading time way down and I already find it annoying that the filter wants to test sites that I own and that I know are not likely to want to take control of my computer.

The Bottom Line
Just about everything I have said here is based on my personal preferences and experience and that means that you may have a totally different experience with IE7 than me. However, in my humble opinion, I don’t see IE7 as being worth raving about and it’s not something that I would suggest anyone rush out and download.

But if you want to try it for yourself then you can download IE7 here

The Mozilla Foundation has announced that a new version of Firefox has been released although at the moment it’s really only suitable for experienced suers and developers. The final safe version should be available by the end of October.

The new version will have a new look with several very different features. The toolbar will be see-through until you need to use it and a new way of bookmarking sites will be available. The new version will also come with some new security features as well.

Yahoo! is about to introduce a new look and if you want a preview just hit the sneak preview link that you will see towards the top of the Yahoo! homepage.

Unfortunately not all browsers are supported so if you’re like me and tried to view it in something other than IE6 or Firefox 1.5 you’re politely told to go away.

An interesting way to deal with the people who are important to you.

If you have ever wanted to be a beta tester for a big software corporation then Microsoft wants to hear from you.

Microsoft is looking for beta testers for an updated test version of IE7 it is about to release and to encourage users to try the product Microsoft is offering free telephone support for those who live in America, Germany and Japan.

This is the first release of IE7 that Microsoft has encouraged the public to use. Previous releases have been aimed more at developers than general users.

This latest version of IE7 will be released this week and you can read more about it here.

An early version of Internet Explorer 7 has been released in Beta and some people are starting to play with it.

You can find one review here

Personally I’m not going to be in a hurry to have a look at it. I don’t like the quirky Firefox that I use for most of my web browsing but IE7 is still in development so I wont’ be changing until there is a stable and reliable version out for general consumption.

There are some new critical updates now available for Firefox so if your browser isn’t telling you that already perhaps it’s time to head over to the Firefox homepage and grab them for yourself.

Earlier this week I had a big rant about Firefox and mentioned that I thought I might return to Internet Explorer. Well I haven’t done that just yet but I noticed today that I was spending a whole lot more time using than I was using Firefox.

And now maybe I might try something else instead of returning totally to IE. I’ve just read over on Home Office Voice that Opera is now free.

I tried Opera a year or so ago and found that I quite liked it but I couldn’t handle the advertising. You see if you wanted the free version you had to put up with advertising and if you wanted to be free of that you had to shell out $39.00. That’s not a big amount I know but … well … like most people I’m always drawn to anything that’s free.

Anyway Opera is now free and you can find it right here

Thanks for the pointer Martin.

Everybody loves to hate Microsoft but just lately I have been slowly moving towards appreciating Microsoft more and more.
This strange transition started not long after I downloaded and installed Firefox as my browser of choice. I have to say that at first I loved Firefox - it has some fantastic features that make life very easy for someone who makes his living from working on the Internet. And those features were missing from IE.

However, it also had one or two quirky little problems that I was learning to live with. For example, if you went to a site to stream a movie Firefox could not do it. The best you could hope for was to download the movie to your own machine and watch it from there.

But that was ok until just recently when I, and others, began to notice that Firefox was becoming even more buggy with each update. For example, when you are looking at this page in IE it will look very different to what you would see in Firefox. In Firefox the text would be bigger and the link colors would be darker.

If I try to make the text bigger for IE viewers then it becomes so big in Firefox that it can display in very bizarre ways that I won’t bore you with here.

And then came this morning. I went to a blog to download a podcast and found that the blog owner had provided several links so that I could either stream the podcast direct from his site or download it - as I wanted to do. So in Firefox I clicked on the download link … and found that it began streaming. And when I clicked on the streaming link … you guessed it. It began to download.

Ok, maybe the blog owner got the links wrong so I checked it in IE and in IE the download link downloaded and the streaming link streamed.

That may not seem like such a big problem but when you have a tool that you use for business then you want that tool to work the way it is supposed to do. It’s a productivity thing - time is money etc. etc.

Internet Explorer may not have all the bells and whistles that Firefox has but at least it works the way it’s supposed to work so maybe it’s time to go back to the tried and tested tools. Just because they carry the Microsoft brand doesn’t mean they don’t work.