Quick little annoyance that I need to gripe about.
I’m prone to beta testing software, since, well… that’s what I do. As such, I’ve been running the IE7 beta ever since it launched and am using it right now to post this. I am impressed with the thoroughness with which Microsoft has stolen features from Firefox and Opera and I am happy that they finally offer decent PNG and CSS support (hooray for 10-year-old technologies).
It generally appears to have been a well thought out product – at least, it becomes a usable browser when compared to IE6. And they have absolutely no excuse not to have produced something just astronomically better than IE6. After all, it’s been 5 years since they released a feature upgrade in their browser – which curiously accompanied all of the anti-trust fun.
That said, I’m expecting that they’ll experience something like tremendous backlash when they start pushing the browser on unsuspecting lusers. The menu layout is borderline arcane. I’m looking as hard as I can, and cannot manage to find anything resembling a “File -> Open” menu option. Ok, I lied. By navigating to “Tools -> Toolbars -> Classic Menu”, I was able to toggle this back on (don’t remember if it is disabled by default or not).
So… I select Open because I want to open a locally stored file – jpeg comp of a site I’m working on. Since I have IE open for testing anyways, and since it offers tabbed browsing and all… I navigate to the directory in question and have to change the file type in the little box to jpeg (by default, they were displaying only html files in the dialog). The file becomes selectable and I tell it to open.
Which it does.
In GIMP.
Now, had I double-clicked on the icon in Windows Explorer, I would have expected to fire up GIMP. But I specifically told Internet Explorer to load the file… Of course, Microsoft swears up and down that they’re separate products, and that your computer can function w/o IE…
URGH!
Upon further investigation (in IE6), it appears that this is IE’s native behavior – that it refuses to display an image unless it is loaded from an html page. Using the open dialog in IE6 on another machine, we got the picture in question to load in the Windows Picture Viewer Thing.