Andrews Family

In case you hadn’t heard, Microsoft recently released Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Windows Media Player 11. And if you hadn’t heard, you probably will soon since Microsoft is going to be pushing IE7 out via Automatic Updates. Don’t worry though, it will prompt you to choose to install it or not and you can always uninstall it later and go back to IE6. I’ve actually been testing beta versions of both for a while now and I’d give them both a thumbs up.

You can check out IE7’s new features on their page here. My favorites are the tabbed browsing, printing (yeah, it finally prints the whole page like you’d expect), and the new search box. The search box it pretty cool because you can add different search engines to it. Then when you want to search for something, simply type it into the box, click the pull down menu, and select your search engine. I’ve got searches set up for Google, Wikipedia, Froogle, and even our search here at Drozmonkey.com. IE7 also has support for RSS feeds, but I prefer a full fledged RSS solution like Google Reader or RSS Bandit. Oh, and they’ve made security improvements to help protect you from phishing scams. IE7 paves the way for more improvement like Windows Defender which is still in beta and is going to be a free tool from Microsoft to protect against spyware.

Windows Media Player 11 has a sleek new look but overall I haven’t found it that much different. I do like their improvements for Internet radio and integration of MTV’s URGE music store. I haven’t bought any music from them but I have listened to their free radio stations to switch things up at work. So for Windows Media Player 11 I’d leave it up to you if you want to upgrade or not. It won’t be pushed out via Automatic Updates so you’d have to go get it here.