So I bit the bullet and downloaded IE7. Despite its many flaws, I liked Internet Explorer 6, but I was very worried about IE7. I gave Firefox and Opera another try, but I just don’t like them, particularly the fact that my wonderful discovery on making tooltips invisible didn’t work in Firefox. So this weekend I backed up my whole computer and downloaded IE7. The installation went fine, though I had to reinstall a couple of other programs, including Microsoft Money.

There are some things that are better: the tabbed interface, though I’m still not used to having to look at the top of the screen to see the open windows, rather than the bottom; when I go to Gmail, I no longer get a blank screen and have to refresh; and when I hover over a link, I always see the URL in my status bar (for some reason, certain links didn’t show in IE6), rather than having to right-click > view properties. On the other hand, IE7 is far less customizable than Microsoft claims. I hate the security alerts, but managed to disabled most of them. I also figured out how to do some of the customizing I needed – I’ll share more about all of that later.