Since installing IE7, I’ve ran into a couple of annoyances.
The largest of which is that you can no longer use the trick to to launch an instance of iexplore.exe under Run As, and then navigate to the Control Panel to get an administrator view of Control Panel if you are logged on as a limited user (for pre-Vista). Now, instead, the admin IE instance will just tell the already-running explorer instance (which is running as your limited user account) to open a window at Control Panel. This is of course not what I want, which leaves me stuck with remembering the names of the individual .cpl files and launching them from an admin. Unfortunately for me, this just made running as a limited user on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 much more painful; not a good thing from the perspective of a browser that is supposed to make things more secure. (In case you were wondering, you can’t just launch an admin explorer.exe while you already have explorer running under your user account. If you try to do this, the admin explorer instance will tell the already running explorer instance to open a new window, and then exit.) Alternatively, I could configure explorer to use a different process for every window, which does actually allow you to run explorer directly with Run As, but this has the unfortunate side effect of dramatically increasing memory usage if you have multiple explorer folder windows open.
The other things I have ran into so far are site compatibility problems, like lists breaking for WordPress. I am not sure if this particular problem is a WordPress one or an IE7 one, having not been particularly inclined to delve into HTML DOM debugging, but WordPress does appear to validate cleanly under the W3C XHTML validator. Some compatibility things are to be expected, of course, but it’s a bit disappointing to see them so glaringly obvious without either WordPress or Microsoft having done something to fix (or even acknowledge) the problem by now. Sigh.
As for tabbed browsing, I’m not sure if I really like this much yet. Up till now, I’ve pretty much always used “old-fashioned”, windowed browsing. I’ll see if tabbed browsing grows on me, but I wish I didn’t have to sacrifice ease of running as non-admin for it…
(Update: a commenter, jpassing, suggested using “explorer.exe /separate” with Run As, which appears to work nicely as a replacement for starting iexplore.exe when IE7 is installed.)
When logged in as a non-admin you can launch an admin-explorer.exe using “explorer.exe /separate”.
That works – thanks!