Nathan's Occasional Blog

So I’ve been watching the keynotes streamed online for the Microsoft Mix06 conference.  Pretty interesting stuff to watch in BillG’s session, especially the geeks behind MySpace.com.  150+ servers to publish their user home pages … and just their home pages.  Running 64–bit Windows and 64–bit SQL 2005.  Nifty!

Anyway, a new preview build of IE7 Beta 2 was published today to coincide with the conference.  I downloaded it and threw it on my virtual Windows XP SP2 machine (I tried an IE beta on my main laptop once … BIG mistake).  Here’s a list of the issues I identified within the first 5 minutes of using IE 7.

1. Yahoo’s portal doesn’t remember my identification, even though I selected the “remember me” box on the sign in page.  I use MyYahoo as my home page on all my workstations.  IE 7 remembers me during a session, but once I close the application it kills the bits (cookie?) that allows Yahoo to identify me as a returning (and logged in) member.  I also tried this with www.KING5.com (local TV station) and had the same behavior.  I can’t find a way (something to turn off) to make that work.  And if I can’t do it, how is my mom going to use this?
2. We use SharePoint internally at my organization as our intranet portal.  In IE6 if I connect to a local server (not behind a firewall) it will pass through authentication from my Windows logon session (I’m logged into our domain).  IE7 didn’t do this.  My coworker tried the first beta 2 preview a few weeks ago and figured out a bunch of settings to get this to work, but geesh.  Corporations that have spent a lot of effort towards single sign on are going to HATE this.
3. The Blogger Atom feed for the blog you’re reading (https://nathan.thenovaks.net/atom.xml) doesn’t work.  In fact, IE7 says the “feed download was interrupted” and continues to blame the server!  “This is possibly due to a server error or an interrupted Internet connection.”  Funny – it seems to work just fine in RSS Bandit.  I don’t do anything special to that feed, in fact it’s totally automatically generated by the Blogger service and then published to my server via FTP.  I can only extrapolate from this that the millions of Blogger feeds out there can’t be subscribed to in IE7.  LAME.

So my conclusion from about 5 minutes spent with IE7 is that while the interface is a lot better, and the security is better, and it’s ability to display content (CSS, etc.) is better … IT IS NO WHERE NEAR READY to be deployed in the wild.  And if some of these things aren’t address, then deploying IE7 in our organization (about 80 client machines) is going to be a nightmare.