Vista
Well, I'm not yet :-(, but Kate Gregory is, and she has a constant stream of great tips and tricks for end users and developers on her blog. Kate is not just fiddling with it, but has been digging deep.
IE7
Did you know that IE7 went “gold” yesterday? It is no longer a beta product. I'm using it and also installed it on my husband's computer in hopes that it would make a wierd problem that I couldn't fix go away (some sites had enormous fonts), and voila, it did. I gave him a quick tour to show him where everything he was used to using can now be found. He originally wanted me to remove the search toolbar since to him, it was just in the way, and he was used to going to [insert name of favorite search engine here]. But when I showed him what it was for, he was an instant fan. The only sad thing I have to report was that when I showed him the search engine options, and pointed out “Live” as Microsoft's latest & greatest, he just said “never heard of it” and chose Google. And no, I didn't stop him.
The “download“, just did a smooth upgrade from IE6 which was comforting. I know that I won't be getting phone calls from all of my neighbors and relatives.
The big bonuses of IE7 for me are the smaller toolbars and the tabbed browsers. I know that there's other beneficial stuff happening in the background that I don't have to pay attention to (e.g. anti-phishing, etc.), but for the most part, the end-user experience feels just like an update. I expect that I'll occasionally take advantage of the RSS tools, but I am subscribed to more blogs than I can read as it is. I also like that the favorites/history/feeds list is no longer an all or nothing option. In IE6, if you opened up history, it just stayed there. Now it has the flexibility of an auto-expanding, dockable container. So, I can open it, click on what I want and it just disappears. I can dock it if I want, but I prefer to save my desktop real estate for the web page.
And of course, this little feature is a lifesaver for my poor eyes:
