The One with the Thoughts of Frans

ClearType and IE7

At the IEblog a little was posted about ClearType in IE7. Of course this was posted at a time more suitable for Americans, so it was already filled with comments. Thus my opinion had already been posted by someone else.

Why is this a setting in IE 7 and not taken from the system wide setting in display properties?

It doesn’t make sense to me that only one app (well, two, IE and Outlook Express) should have the option specifically for that app when all apps have the option from the global property. Particularly because this isn’t a setting you would enable a per application basis.

Clear type is nice and all if you have the right monitor, but come on, this doesn’t make sense.

There were more posts on the blog, some of which actually managed to make me laugh or raise an eyebrow. I’ll quote an example. It’s an old friend for us Opera users (and more recently to Firefox users with some extension and Maxthon users).

What’s my favourite feature in the new IE? I’m an old Office hound myself, and so I really love to see Zoom. Available from the bottom right of the main browse window, this acts like it does in Word or Excel – it enlarges or reduces the entire page (text and graphics) to a specific zoom setting.

My opinion of IE has not changed, nor is it likely to change. All that’s changed is that it’s moving a bit again, which might maintain userbase. But I still forecast a flow of users towards other browsers. The roots of “the others” have simply grown to deep to stop their growth now.

Or one could write this into a “biblical” story, in which case my conclusion in the above paragraph would be like this:

Cane just laughed, and the sound was as of a thousand coins of gold rained down from the heavens. Many heard the laughter, and felt comforted. Others, though, knew Cane for what it was: the same Cane as old, only polished, shiny and new.

Since I was already promoting Opera over IE, you could as well see what the next version of Opera copied from the AOL Internet Explorer browser and how Opera already does something (much) better for years already which IE7 has recently implemented and Firefox can do through an extension.

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.