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IE 7.0 Beta 2 Available to the Public

Posted by Zonk on from the download-and-test-for-it-is-enjoyable dept.

spyrochaete writes "Microsoft has just made available their latest beta preview build of their Internet Explorer 7.0 web browser. New features such as tabbed browsing and RSS subscription are summarized in an animated tour. MS welcomes feedback at the Internet Explorer 7 newsgroup." There's also a Channel 9 interview available, as well as commentary on the IEBlog. Update: 01/31 19:58 GMT by Z : prostoalex wrote in with a link to a review of the release at PC Magazine.

18 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. ACID2 test? by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How do they fare in the ACID2 test, compared to their old bloody (everything's red, it must be blood!) result? Can anyone post a screenshot?

    1. Re:ACID2 test? by kimvette · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Want to see a screenshot of Acid2 in Konqueror? Check it out:

      http://kim.biyn.com/files/images/konqueror_3.5_pas ses_acid2_thanks_apple.png

      Also: Google Maps works just fine in Konqueror as well (a hell of a lot better than in Firefox) if you spoof Safari's user agent. Just FYI.

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
  2. Ad blocker? by dada21 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Some AdSense advertisers are complaining that IE7 has a built in adblocker specifically targetting Google's ads. Can anyone confirm this?

  3. Looks nice but.... by jerryodom · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Doesn't bode well when I'm getting Javascript errors at the IE7 tour page and in the tour pages. I do like the quick tabs. They seem like they'll be pretty useful. Lets hope the the security measures really help secure our PCs and not open us up to new attacks.

    --
    For some reason I refuse to use either spell check or the spacebar properly.
  4. IE Is Still an Alzheimer's Patient.... by Muad'Dib129 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I saw the first beta through my company (has an MSDN subscription) and this version LOOKS alot better, but still hogs a ton of memory. At present time, its using 104MB of ram, 79MB of pagefile space. The only thing I have loaded is this wonderful site: slashdot.org. Firefox is using just 24.8MB of memory. Looks like I'm uninstalling already. The UI is pretty, though.

  5. Preview tab is sweet by twbecker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I like that you can preview all the tabs you have open in one spot, and either switch to them or close them from there. Honestly, I expect that IE7's tabbed browsing will be better than vanilla Firefox. Firefox gets several things wrong out of the box (which are being fixed for FF2.0, and are available in trunk builds now).

    --
    "The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
  6. Just FYI by GillBates0 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Just because I know a number of you n3rds here will try to see what the IP address that is reported as a "Phishing website" on the penultimate page of the tour is, I already checked. It belongs to MSFT itself.

    http://207.68.142.106/contoso/enroll_auth.html
    Search ARIN WHOIS for: 207.68.142.106
    OrgName: Microsoft Corp
    OrgID: MSFT
    Address: One Microsoft Way
    City: Redmond
    StateProv: WA
    PostalCode: 98052
    Country: US
    NetRange: 207.68.128.0 - 207.68.207.255
    CIDR: 207.68.128.0/18, 207.68.192.0/20
    NetName: MICROSOFT-CORP-MSN-BLK
    NetHandle: NET-207-68-128-0-1
    Parent: NET-207-0-0-0-0

    I always wanted to see Microsoft blacklist itself in one of it's intricate series of patch releases, security alerts, and spam filters. Now my life is complete.

    --
    An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
  7. Doubt I'll switch back by Pedrito · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm not fond of upgrading software. Being a software developer, I often don't have a choice. I often have to make sure I'm using the latest of anything that might be work-related and that includes things like Office and other supporting software.

    But with something like a web browser, I get a choice. I held off on switching to Firefox. I tried some earlier version and while they had nice features, there were too many issues, I wouldn't switch. Shortly before the 1.0 release, I finally made the switch. The two most compelling features for me were the tabbed browsing and the keyworded bookmarks (which I use ALL the time).

    I don't know if IE 7 has the keyworded bookmarks and without it (or something similar), I wouldn't even consider it. But the fact remains that without some compelling new features, I doubt I will switch and from what I've seen so far, there's just nothing like that.

    I suspect a lot of regular users are like that. Without a really compelling reason, they won't switch. I suspect IE 7.0 will fail to turn the tide of people switching to Firefox.

  8. Eh, too little too late by finkployd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm using it now to post this comment, and then I'm switching right back. The toolbar is ugly (granted it is beta), and I'm amused that Yahoo is the default search tool over MSN (google of course is not even an option, after all who searches with that?).

    Rendering is still sub par, tabs are nice though. All in all, it has a strong "welcome to the cutting edge of web browsing, circa 2003" feel to it. Given that Firefox actually has some momentum now even in corporate America, not to mention joe average who is beginning to draw a connection between spyware and IE, I think MS is going to have to do better than a poor Firefox clone to reverse that trend.

    Finkployd

  9. Re:first look - running dialogue by iamlucky13 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Prompt to save passwords on forms defaults to off? Bleh.
    I very strongly feel that saving passwords on forms should be off by default, given the number of shared computers out there (why not handle that option during the "advanced user" install?). I recently sat down at a computer in a school lab and the Gmail login page loaded up with someone elses username and password already filled in, no doubt because they'd gone to login, and the dialog had popped up asking them if they wanted it to remember their password, and they clicked yes without thinking about it. Yes, that would be a stupid move, but a lot of users have gotten used to "Yes, load the insecure website,"; "Yes, accept the third party content"; etc. Keep in mind this episode happened with Slashdot's favorite "secure" browswer, Firefox. Anyway, since it happened to be a friend's email account, I logged in and sent him a mysterious email from his own account letting him know, but other people could've done much worse.

    I'm a little surprised. I remember a story several months back saying that IE7 would only work on Vista. Is this just a special build with limited features, or will we see IE7 be backwards compatible? More importantly, I'm dying to know if there has been any improvement to the CSS support since beta 1.
  10. Re:Once again... by Firewheels · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And given this, it may be interesting to note that just about all other major browsers render compliant to standards, despite having frequent release schedules.

    Can MS say the same?

  11. Why should MS care? by mmalove · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The internet browser is free. MS makes no money on it. What is their motivation to put out a new version of IE as opposed to something like say, MS Office, where they make 100-300 bucks a pop on it?

    Or a new OS?

    --
    You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
  12. Fixed attribute by mla_anderson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Still no concept of position: fixed in IE7. Ugh.

    --
    Sig is on vacation
  13. Configure Clear Type properly by yotaku · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Everyone's eyes have different sesitivities to different light wavelengths. Since cleartype uses different colors with the layout of the colored pixels of your monitor, it should be configured for each monitor and user to provide the best results.

    Link to online cleartype calibration site:
    http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tune r/Step1.aspx

  14. Re:first look - running dialogue by naasking · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Built-in phishing protection = good

    Actually, it's horrible. It submits every URL you try to access to MS for verification. Same with the Google toolbar in fact, except the latter is even worse because it submits it over an unencrypted connection. These anti-phishing efforts break the current semantics of the web. These efforts are seriously misguided and truly disheartening, particularly when there are perfectly good anti-phishing tools that do things right.

    --
    Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
  15. Default Search engine by sleepophile · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The biggest surprise for me was that the default search engine in the search box was google and not MSN search!Pretty strange considering how much MS hates google...

  16. Re:No need to use ACID... by GeekDork · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I mean that properties are somehow leaking out of their context. If you think you know a better way to express it, then don't bicker but say how! It's like this:

    <div class="c1">
    ...
    </div>
    <div class="c1"> <h1>Heading</h1> </div>

    The h1 is displayed with the preceding div's CSS properties. The page in question validates with the W3C validator and is displayed as intended by Firefox, Opera and Konqueror.

    --

    Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.

  17. My take by astrosmash · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The Good:
    1. They haven't tried to reinvent the wheel with respect to tabbed browsing and search. They got it mostly right. As a Firefox and Safari user I generally feel at home using IE 7, which is a pleasent surprise.
    2. I like the placement of the new-tab button and close-tab buttons. (Better than Firefox)
    3. Clicking on a web page's orange XML icon brings up an RSS reader instead of dumping raw XML. (Better than Firefox, again)
    4. Real zoom. Try this: view this web page in IE7 and hit Ctrl-+ a few times, then do the same in Firefox. Huge difference; beats Firefox again.
    5. Although the old menu bar is gone, the old menu accelerators still work; e.g. Alt-F shows the old menu bar and displays the file menu as expected.

    The Bad:

    1. They *still* don't have smooth scrolling working correctly. In fact, mouse wheel scrolling in general is very slow and choppy. (Actually, it appears to be OK on some sites, crappy on others)
    2. It's a surprising rough release. It's quite slow at loading, scrolling, and resizing, and has crashed a couple of times for no apparent reason. I'm surprised they released it like this, beta or not.
    3. Lots of rendering errors, too. I don't know if that's because of actual bugs, or because IE is *now* rendering correctly and the IE5/6 specific web sites are wrong.
    4. IE *still* doesn't render large tables until the entire table has loaded.
    5. Unacceptably large memory usage (over 70 MB of VM after a few minutes of use)
    6. Draging links or text onto the tab bar or doesn't work as expected; Can't drag text at all onto the tab bar, which is one of may favorite features of both Safari and Firefox.
    7. I don't like the lack of menu bar. I'm dreading the thought of having to explain over the phone to my parents how to open the options dialog.

    Bottom line: There isn't enough here to get me to switch from Firefox (or Safari :p), and if they don't reign in the memory usage I doubt I'll even install it, but when I have to use IE on a friend or co-worker's machine, I'll be very glad if they have IE7 installed.

    --
    ENDUT! HOCH HECH!