To upgrade or not

Dear TPH,
I heard that Microsoft has just released Internet Explorer 7. Is it good enough for me to consider an upgrade?
F.T.

Dear F.T.,
Much to the annoyance of most of my "groovy," "new age," "Microsoft hating" friends, I have stuck with IE over the years, ignorantly disregarding the advances of Netscape, Mozilla, Mosaic and Opera. This was more out of indifference rather than of any loyalty to Mr. Gates or in support of MS through the anti-trust trials. Knowing Microsoft, I always had a hunch that IE would be the least troublesome browser to use on a Windows platform. If you can imagine what a rude shock it was for me to find out that the rest of the world had moved on and evolved while I was stuck in the IE time capsule, then you would also be able to understand my relief when IE 7 came out.

During the past few years, upstart browsers such as Firefox and Opera have apparently reduced IE to an ancient relic almost on the verge of becoming a major attraction in museums around the world. IE7 has done more to catch up with the others than breaking new ground – fuelling rumours that the word "innovation" was not even found in MS Word's thesaurus.

The important question here is "should you upgrade?" Actually, that depends on what you're using now. If you are using IE6 then you should definitely upgrade. (If you are using something even older than IE6, then you should seriously consider giving up the use of computers altogether and go see a doctor before your ignorance becomes a threat to society.) If you are using something other than IE, you should probably stick with what you have because as I said, IE7 isn't better.

That is not to say that IE7 doesn't have any useful features, but just that its competitors have had those features for years.

The one that is bound to hit you first is tabbed browsing. Gone are the days when fifty thousand windows muddled up your taskbar. (Instead you will have a single browser window with fifty thousand tabs!) Trust me, this is no gimmick! Its one thing you are sure to get hooked on to.

Other changes are subtler. For instance, the omnipresent "File, Edit…" menu that has been at the top of just about every application window since the 'Big Bang' is gone!!! Life may never be the same again without that menu, but once you get used to it, you are sure to appreciate the extra five millimetres that its absence has freed up for the webpage. Another cool feature of IE7 is that you can zoom pages in and out with "Ctrl +" and "Ctrl -" respectively.

IE7 also supports RSS feeds, and you may agree that it's about time it did. Microsoft claims this is the most secure Web browser ever made. With a few bugs in Mozilla surfacing during the last few weeks, I will hold back my sarcastic comments for a while and bide time on that one, but it is possible that a security flaw (or two or three…) could be discovered in IE7 even before you read this!

Don't bother to rush to www.microsoft.com/ie for the IE7 download unless you have Windows XP or Windows 2003 because, you'll have to upgrade your operating system first. IE7 will not work on anything older than that. Also, you will need to ensure that you have a licensed version of XP or 2003 (Rest assured that IE 7 is not going to work on the copy of Windows XP you bought for Rs 100.00 at Unity Plaza!) But there's no rush anyway… it will probably take the duration of your lifetime and mine before IE8 is released!