soledad penadés

"Easier and more secure": That's how Microsoft describes the brand new Internet explorer 7. I don't really know about the security since I haven't used IE7 myself, but on Friday I got a desperated call for help from one of the colleagues at the office.

Could you please help me with this browser? I lost one toolbar... don't know how...

But when I got faced with that interface... oh my god... I had seen the screenshots but the real, it's-executing-right-now sensation was absolutely terrible. I came to the desktop and the girl was in a crazy state of confusion:

This explorer just got updated and since then I can't find any of my stuff... and it has this tabs thing which i don't know how it works... it's opening pages in those tabs and I don't even know how to close them... oh well.. but the worst thing is that I lost my menu toolbar!

I couldn't stop my eyes in a single point ... all those buttons in that clunky collection of different interface styles, and in my mind just one word: crazy! crazy! crazy! crazy!

To be honest, I didn't know where to look for the toolbar either. Tried clicking here and there, got nothing useful. It took me like 5 minutes to find out where to click and enable the menu bar again (after clicking on everywhere else, really, using the old trial and error technique), and left with a confused state of mind as well.

How can it be so complicated? When other browsers are just reducing the interface to the minimum (for example, it was being considered to merge the stop and reload buttons in Konqueror, if I recall properly), there we have the new blue e generation with increased difficulty even for advanced users (I think I can consider myself an advanced user).

It basically doesn't work. If I can't figure out the meaning of the icons (and I have seen LOTS of icons since I first used a computer) how do they expect anybody else to understand it? And it's not that I can't figure out what does each icon mean, the additional problem is the organisation of the top area. When I thought everybody agreed with the "if it works, doesn't fix it" rule, they go and split the traditional back-forward-stop-reload toolbar in two. Which creates confusion. And in the second row, there's that star. What's that for? One immediately thinks that it is for creating new tabs, since it's in the same line that the tabs are. But then, what's the purpose of the + icon? Is it an special type of tabs? and even more, what's the point of that empty little tab at the end? if I click it, will it create another tab?

And why is each icon completely different from the others? Confusion! confusion!

I think I'm still confused!