So I needed to update a few patches for XP and though I know they lie a lot with most releases, I decided to trust the
evil bastards. I can always restore and go back to IE6, or use Firefox...or whatever.
This thing is a piece of dung. To return to the popular 'your computer as a car' metaphor, this is like having your car worked on and, after you agree to the warranty work, next thing you know you go to pick it up and there's a guy sitting in the front seat...a helpful advisor. Who won't shut up. And won't leave. He a) speaks only his mixed dialect of Swahili-Phoenician, b) is unaware that you didn't ask for him, c) is permanently attached to your car now. d) is quite unattractive and takes up most of the available space you had in your car. Heck, he even waves his hands in front of you while you try to drive. Cool upgrade, thanks!
If you haven't tried it, just remember that lovely feeling you used to have with old track-ball mice...you move it around and it doesn't do what it should. You clean it out and it still doesn't...you try to work and it impairs everything you are attempting to do. You lament the fact that it has a cord so you can't throw it very far. I'm not saying every new feature they have is useless... lots of their new functionality is so useful that we've all been using it for the past year in our google toolbar. Whee, I have duplicated stuff all over now, with incentives to remove Google's! Got anti-trust? Now I have the one auto search bar in my toolbar that is labeled Google, and I have the plain-jane one that IE7 doesn't let you disable without using a tweak/registry change. I would have appreciated it having a setting to turn it off, but you know those MS guys...always going with the logical approach of 'well if you can disable the Google one and you can't disable ours, maybe you should just umm.. use ours? Duh! You're welcome!' Note,
here's the link to tweaks to move the main menu for your IE to the top (wow...heresy..who would want to do that...don't make that a built-in option guys) or to remove the MS search window (which I would have set to default to Google's engine anyway).
Another excellent feature... not allowing scripted windows by default... as in the easy html linkage buttons on pages like this one to embed a link while you're writing some tool-powered HTML. Feel like
linking something while you post on blogger? Okay, well just try it, then click the popup bar to allow scripted windows temporarily. Oh, and every time you're on the page you're going to be doing this. There's no setting for 'allow this site to do this in the future'... oh no, that would be helpful. Of course, you could probably disable all your security settings for mid-level security sites and that might fix it. That's how I used to browse most places actually: medium level security. Well now if you're not pretty high-level security, IE gives you a complimentary window-wide message bar at the top of your screen on *EVERY* page reminding you that 'Your computer settings are not secure...click here!' You can search some on how to remove this stupid feature from hell if you'd like by gimping out your standard settings -- naturally changing IE7's default settings can and will remove some functionality from Web sites you regularly visit.
Here is a discussion on it...
Why not just set IE 7's security level to "High"? It's always possible to crank IE's Internet Zone up to the High security level instead of Medium-High. Doing this, however, makes most Web sites unusable, because IE then pops up a warning every time some harmless page script runs. Sometimes, several warnings appear on every page of a site. Using the customized settings shown above — and adding respected companies to your Trusted Sites zone — provides you with fairly good protection without subjecting you to such pointless harassment.
Ugg. Really. I am not a super tweaker of web-browsers but to return to the car analogy when they F my engine up this much, I pretty much am resigned to buying the parts book and learning how to build my engine from scratch now just so I can continue to drive the thing. And don't you feel sorry for people who can't even figure out how to change their menu settings on a program? This thing is as bad as AOL. Hand-holding? Try chinese fingercuffs.
Oh well... there ya go. I'm 'upgraded' now, and the top of my screen is much more cluttered and not the way I like it. Whatever happened to the concept of offereing the user the option to 'use classic view'? It sure makes XP bearable as an OS.
Sucktastic. That's what is on the horizon, I mean vista.
p.s. The fix to the windows script linkage thing, i.e. not wanting to be prompted everytime by a frequently-visited site like blogger.com ,is to enable this option under Tools/Internet Options/Security:
Allow websites to prompt for information using scripted windows. I'm surprised the little warning strip didn't come back from doing that, but hey, I had just assumed there were two security settings 'danger will robinson' and 'high-default-allow-nothing'. That'll fix the problem for now though. I'm sure that's painfully obvious to the web-scripters and devs out there reading this, but try to think of the non-I.T. people who are upgrading to IE7 and dealing with this crap.
Like I said, sucktastic. Damn my UI looks like hell now. Will have to work on it more tomorrow.
