Internet Explorer 7 - Messy by Design

You really have to wonder about the minds of the team who designed Internet Explorer 7, it's like a jigsaw puzzle that has been thrown into the air and designed around wherever the pieces drop.

Why is the menu bar below the address bar?
Why are the stop and refresh buttons all the way over to the top right?
Why can I not customise the bar and move buttons to where I want?
Why does a tab not have a close button until it is in focus?

So many questions but no answers.  The answers are only in the minds of the design team. 

If like me you would like the menu bar above the address bar where it belongs, I will not go into it here, but there is a registry hack which allows you to put it at the top.  Head on over to GeeksAreSexy Blog for a full guide.  If you do not want to access the registry yourself, head on over to Snapfiles.com and download a little tweak program to do it for you.  As ever with tweaking the registry the usual warning applies and please do backup your registry first.

Sadly I do not think there are other tweaks to enable you to customise the buttons.  Yes you can add buttons but cannot really move them to where you want.

I am sure there will be many people out there shouting "Firefox, use that".  Of course Firefox is not perfect either.  Why does it treat an image copy as a download?  In IE7 an image will be saved to my pictures folder where it belongs instead of a default download folder.

My favourite browser has always been Opera.  Its the fastest on earth.  However that is not perfect either - Opera likes to eat away at your file associations and claim ownership of too many things. 

I don't like Firefox much (In fact I hate it) but at the moment it is my default browser.  Internet Explorer 7 just feels too restrictive and until they sort out the design I will avoid it wherever possible.