Concept 2.0

First look for myself anyway. I installed Internet Explorer 7 RC1 last night to take a look at it. After all it's heading towards a release and with the rumour that it's going to be pushed as a forced updated on XP, it means that soon there will be a lot of users using a browser that I haven't tested compatability with on any of my sites.

The Browser
Ok, let's start off with the browser itself. It's been made a lot slicker. That's a code word for it looks a lot more like Forefox now. The file menu has actually been taken out and now the top of the browser consists of two rows. The first has your navigation buttons, address box and quick search that nobody is going to be using because of how much lock it has on Windows Live Search.

The second row consists of your tabs including a neat little quick tabs page which allows you to preview all of the tabs in little PowerPoint style boxes. Then on the right of that you have buttons for your homepage, RSS feeds, printing, and two drop downs called "page" and "tools" which basically make up the options you would have had on your file menu.

While this creates a lot of space it does reduce the amount of space you have for tabs when you don't have the browser full expanded on a large monitor.

Finally at the bottom you have your status bar which now includes a quick option to magnify the page. It also has a phishing alert icon which regularly incourages you to check if the website you are on is listed in anti-phishing databases. Unfortunatly, the icon that appears to encourage you to check the site actually looks like the site has been flagged and so many users will probably think most of the sites they go on are phishing scams.

How it renders
So far it's looking pretty good. I went down the massive list of my sites and opened them all so while I only saw the homepage they all seemed to look for the most part ok. IE7 seems to really for for the whole anti-alias text rendering as everything on the page seems to have it (or maybe I'm thinking of something else, point is, it looks pretty ;)).

There are still certain problems for example it still doesn't support transparent backgrounds for form lists. Also the only major issue I have found so far is that it seems to be incompatable with the default theme that comes with MediaWiki. It renders the top menu bar on the left and so is hidden behind the logo. MediaWiki have newer versions out which may have fixed that but given the new versions need PHP5 which few webmasters have it looks like it is time for some custom CSS hacking to get that fixed.

Conclusion
I'll need to do lots more testing and playing around before I can really give IE7 a thumbs up (or down) though so far it seems Microsoft have put some time into it. It will be interesting to see how the release of IE7 affects the browser market share.

Come on seriously now, there are two many of them. Every activity, media type, religion, etc, etc now has it's own niche social network. How many niche social networks do you use? Probably very few. Why use any more than one? Ideally we probably would if all our friends were on it and all the features. Nobody wants to use more than one.

Yet for some reason they keep getting funding. People are still putting millions of dollars into these new social network start-ups that offer nothing new. How are they planning to make money? They aren't going to get the traffic. If things continue like this, I can see another bubble that's going to burst.