You don’t have to use Internet Explorer just because it comes with Windows. There are much better choices available, and they’re almost all free.

I’ve added a new article called Get a better browser to the Tutorials & Guides section. It provides a roundup of Internet Explorer’s main competition.

IE 7’s daft design 

As I wrote ‘Get a better browser’, I was thinking about why I dislike Internet Explorer 7 so much. There’s no doubt it’s more secure than its predecessor, Internet Explorer 6. It also has support for tabs and other features we’ve come to expect from a good browser. And yet, I hate using it.

Why? Because it’s designed for last-generation screens. Most of us have replaced the old, almost-square screens we used to have with widescreen flat panels. Even if you haven’t made the shift to widescreen format, chances are you’re using a much larger screen than you had 5 years ago. On such a screen, Internet Explorer 7’s far-right placement of its toolbar icons makes using the browser awkward. To click the Home, Refresh or Stop buttons, for example, you have to move the mouse pointer all the way over to the right of the screen, and that can be a long trip if you have your browsre maximised on a 21- or 24-inch screen. Worse, although in IE 6 we had the power to move the toolbars around and place them where we wanted, that control has been all but eliminated in IE 7, so we’re stuck with Microsoft’s toolbar placement.

This might seem like a small thing, but if you use your browser a lot, it’s little things like this that will drive you nuts. It’s also a good indication that Microsoft’s programmers failed to think like users; if they had, IE 7 would have a very different design.