Yesterday, while I was engaged in an over-the-phone transaction with Circuit City, they needed to send me a series of emails. The emails were taking what seemed like a loong time to hit my gmail inbox, and while I waited, I noticed a link that said “Get faster Gmail.” This morning, I clicked that link, and saw that it involved an upgrade to IE7.
“What the hell,” I thought, and I did the upgrade.
Now I hate the way my browser window looks. I have increased the icon sizes to “large”, but the nagivation button’s are not where I want to them to be, and I can’t find any clues to how to move them.
Is there a template somewhere that will, with a single keystroke, make the IE7 page look like the IE6 page? At least generally?
And as long as I’m wishing for things, can I have a pony?
I don’t know if IE7 is even skinnable, to be honest.
However, if you’re really attached to the IE6 look and feel, you could download Mozilla Firefox and install the IE6 Theme. Firefox is itself an excellent browser, and in my opinion a much better alternative to Internet Explorer.
(Note: the above theme is in the “experimental phase,” which means you’ll need to register a Firefox Addons account and log in before you can download it. I tried it out, and it seems to work fine, but it’s apparently just in a “beta” stage before release. Kinda like GMail for the last five years. :p)
Nah, thanks anyway. I don’t feel like messing about with new browsers.*
Is there any way to make the IE7 NOT display “tabs” in each browser window? I definitely don’t want those. And when I right-click a link I don’t want it to offer to open the link in a “New Tab”.
And I’m still waiting on that pony.
*If this thing gets much more annoying, though, I might change my mind.
Well, you can turn off tabbed browsing if you want to: just go to Tools->Internet Options; in the window that pops up there should be a section near the bottom labeled “Tabs.” Click the “Settings” button - another window will pop up. Here, uncheck the “Enable tabbed browsing” checkbox, hit “OK” a couple of times, and then close all open Internet Explorer windows. The next time you start IE7, the tabs will be gone.
Though if you ask me, it might be worth giving tabbed browsing a try. Once I got used to it, I found it hard to even imagine what life was like before browser tabs. To each his own, though; I guess it’s a matter of preference.
Anyway, at least upgrading to IE7 was a very good move, even if the new interface takes some getting used to. IE6 was a minefield of security holes; browsing the web with IE6 in this day and age is basically like asking for your computer to be hacked and absorbed into a botnet. :o
Just go to the subfolder C: \ WINDOWS \ ie7 and right-click on the file iexplore.exe and select Send To, Desktop (create shortcut). When you double click on that shortcut it will open IE7 in ‘IE6’ mode.
Note: You’ll probably have to change the folder view setting to “Show hidden files and folders” in order to see the ie7 subfolder. To do that open any regular folder, click on Tools, Folder Options, click on the View tab, and change the setting under Hidden files and folders.
When I first switched from IE6 to IE7 I was not real happy with the UI changes. I forced myself to use it for about a week. After that, IE6 felt so clunky & not having tabs was such a bother that I upgraded llmy other machines immediately.
Moral of story: Give it a try for a week before you decide to go to great lengths to keep the old look/feel/features.
