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Internet Explorer 7 was released in final version just over a month ago, and it’s distributed as an automatic update. The auto upgrade is relatively painless, and the new IE offers many advantages over its predecessor, such as tabbed browsing and the anti-phishing filter, ActiveX opt-in and other security enhancements. Unfortunately, it still contains a few bugs (or are they “undocumented features”) that result in my using Firefox much more often than I would otherwise.

One of the most annoying in everyday life is the tiny font problem. We’re talking really small here, and changing the text size in the View menu has no effect. You can use the zoom here to make the text readable (118% does the trick), but the problem is that the tiny fonts only appear on some web sites, so when you go to another site that doesn’t have the problem, you have to adjust the zoom again. Firefox displays both pages in a reasonable font size without the need for adjustments.

The other, potentially more worrisome but much less frequent problem is IE lockup. Every once in a while (maybe once every three days), IE 7 just quits working. I’ll be browsing with no problem and then when I click a link or type in a URL, it just won’t connect, just sits there spinning its wheels for minutes. Meanwhile, Firefox will connect to the same site immediately.

Are you experiencing any problems as well? 

Deb Shinder, MVP