More Internet Explorer Woes

Wow, it’s bad enough that the current version of Internet Explorer can’t get it right, now it looks like the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 release is goofing it up too. Specifically with its solution for tabbed browsing.

Apparently, in order to support most current 3rd party and because of old code, they’ve decided that 3rd party attachments (Google taskbar, etc) will be placed individually in each tab, rather then inside the application itself. So if you have a browser with 5 tabs open and you have Google Taskbar running, rather than just having the one google taskbar attached to your browser, you have 5 individual google taskbars - one for each tab. So much for placing the toolbar wherever you want (perhaps the top right corner next to the address bar? Not in IE7), and who knows what kind of memory killer this will be if you (like me) often have more than 10 tabs open.

To see a better visual representation of this check out Adam Stiles screenshot mock. In the comments, Bruuce Morgan (Dev Manager for IE7 Tabbed Browsing Feature Team) confims that screenshot is roughly how the Google taskbar will function:

Our testing showed that if we went with a single thread for all tabs in a window, we would encounter many more UI stalls and jerkiness - too many things both in our code and common 3rd party code block on various things like network activity.

I smell a lousy excuse. Firefox seems to do it just fine, and you’d think Microsoft would have a more abundant source of resources to throw at this to get it right.

As Judi Sohn of A View From Home says:

I can see it now, IE 7 is a huge flop and MS can say, “See?!? We told you that tabbed browsing wasn’t a good idea but we tried to make it work for you anyway and it didn’t. So now we’re going to scrap tabbed browsing before Longhorn and stick with what already works for us.”

Thanks for nuthin’, Microsoft.

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