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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.

4 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. Fixed attribute by mla_anderson · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

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    Sig is on vacation
  4. 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.

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    ENDUT! HOCH HECH!