I was always a bit sceptic about Microsoft’s products on the day of release (do you remember the media center presentation?). Well since I work in a web agency and Microsoft is scaring us about releasing IE7 to the wild on November 1st I had to install it to see if everything works (no I didn’t install any Betas since I hate Betas and I don’t have another legal version of WinXP to put into a VM).
The install went smoothly, I forgot to turn off my Spybot but I knew I have to allow all the changes to the registry. When I opened the new Explorer I saw something I actually expected – it told me that some of the installed extensions were out of date, that it disabled them and they need to be reinstalled for use. I was redirected to the IEDevToolbar page but unfortunately the download page was down.
The infobar did not go away, so after some time I figured I need to restart Explorer. After starting Explorer in normal mode (I realized later that the first start was obviously “Safe mode” or as Microsoft calls it “(No Add-ons)”) the thing broke imediately. Restarts and restarts and the chrome was disappearing faster and faster.
Fortunately I’m an ‘advanced’ user and ran the IE in safe mode again and disabled all the add-ons that reside in the chrome (toolbars and stuff) and now it seems to work normaly. Pretty annoying though – I have to reinstall them all by hand since I have no idea if it has an auto update feature.
So Microsoft – please change this behaviour or I’ll be getting loads of phonecalls from my relatives after they get IE7 installed and it doesn’t work since they have Yahoo/Google toolbars installed. If I do I’ll be telling them to switch to Firefox. I hear the next version will be out by then.