IE 7.0 Beta 2 Available to the Public

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.

Comments

Once again...

[Kesch]

I will repeat my earlier sentiment. Windows update with tabs and RSS, yipee!

Once again I will return to browsing the internet with Firefox.

Re:Once again...

[CastrTroy]

Microsoft cannot survive developing new features at its current pace. 5 years between releases for SQL server and and 3 years for most other applications is too much. We haven't had a new IE since 2001. Meanwhile, new versions of the competing open source solutions are being released every year, sometimes more often, with tons of new features. At this rate, in 10 years, MS software will have a quarter of the features of the competing open source products.

Re:Once again...

[bersl2]

It's not the number of features that's important; it's whether you implement the important ones well.

Re:Once again...

[robgamble]

They didn't need a new IE until Firefox started creating bona fide competition.

Re:Once again...

[Mike Savior]

Noone spits on Apple for doing it. Not trying to flame, trying to make a point.

Re:Once again...

[cristij]

I don't mean to defend MS, but I don't think the differentiators are the frequency of the releases, or the additional features.

If a product is well designed and build you don't need frequent releases. In regards to features, most people don't want to do many things with a browser except view web pages, and it a browser does that good and creates a pleasant experience users don't care about features they wouldn't use anyway.

Take the example of the iPod: there are plenty of players out there with a ton more features and available for a lower price. But none of them come even close in market share. Features don't win the hearts of consumers.

Re:Once again...

[Firewheels]

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?

Re:Once again...

[chowsapal]

Are there any extra features? Their handling of RSS is more user friendly (when you click into an XML page), but I don't see live bookmarks. There are still no mouse gestures, ctl-L still pops up a window, no AdBlock... It's like catching up with an ex-girlfriend who's finally learned to play video games, then finding out she's gained 200 pounds and a beard. You can keep her.

Tabbed Browsing!!!

[gasmonso]

Way to lead the pack MS!!!!

http://religiousfreaks.com/

ACID2 test?

[Spy der Mann]

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?

Re:ACID2 test?

[verbatim]

Doesn't look too good

http://img92.imageshack.us/img92/4388/ie7b2acid4pw .jpg

Re:ACID2 test?

[mattyohe]

The latest version of Safari. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/28/121 5227

Re:ACID2 test?

[Illissius]

In addition to the above, Opera 9 preview 1 almost passes except for a single yellow block which is rendered red. I'd guess even that is fixed in the internal builds by now (and I also have a suspicion there'll be a new preview soon, but that's just me ;).

Re:ACID2 test?

[SleeknStealthy]

I just installed IE 7 Beta 2 from the Microsoft Website and using the test provided here:

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/reference.ht ml

IE 7 passed the test with flying colors. The only browser that does this good is Konqueror.

Joe

Re:ACID2 test?

[SleeknStealthy]

Haha...that is hilarious, I guess I should pay better attention. Thanks for pointing out my error. Joe

Re:ACID2 test?

[kimvette]

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.

first look - running dialogue

[Tumbleweed]

Okay, first start it up, and you get a web site with a broken image and 'errors on page'. Nice.

Somewhat goofy interface, reminiscent of Opera. Oy. How do I turn off these cartoony buttons?

Built-in phishing protection = good

Okay, load the company's homepage:

        Layout seems perfect.

        Uhoh - dig the heavy main font; THAT ain't right. Something as basic as font weight is fucked up? Very bad. It looks like everything is bolded now. :( The fonts _look_ nice, though, unless they're italic, then they're hard to read. Definitely some font issues going on here.

        It's also slower with the menu changing background colours. Probably because of debugging code in the beta. I hope.

        Okay, quick check to see if IE6 is still on here...aaaannddd...of course not. Fuckers. Okay, let's check in Firefox, yep, what I thought. IE7 is messing up some of the menu's CSS effects - sometimes putting an underline under some of the items when it shouldn't. Still beta, so no biggie.

        Okay, load company site 2:

        More sophisticated layout, layout still fine. Good.

        Okay, load company site 3:

        Much more sophisticated layout, and front page layout looks fine, but visited link colour is wrong.

Built-in close-tab X on each tab, but only when focused on that tab. Better than default FF behaviour, but they should take a look at Tab Mix Plus extension features.

Okay, let's check the Options!

Popup blocker defaults to off? Bleh.

Prompt to save passwords on forms defaults to off? Bleh.

AHA - font problem solved - installing IE7 turns on ClearType: MONDO STUPID. Turn of ClearType, restart, fonts are back to normal. Whew.

Okay, so, it seems to load Slashdot well enough.

It remembers many IE6 settings, but others (like preferred fonts) it does not. Not a biggie for a beta.

So, all in all, not bad for the first public beta.

Same ctrl-T to open new tab as in FF. Bueno.

Re:first look - running dialogue

[Tumbleweed]

Quick question for you: does IE7 antialias text normally? Or is it a ClearType-only thing? I understand ClearType to be only for LCD panels. (Also, what do you hate about it? I've never used it myself.)

It IS only for LCD panels, though some people will tell you it also works on CRTs: not true. There are no subpixels on a CRT. If you have a discerning eye, you'll hate it on a CRT. What I don't like about what it does to text on a CRT: it makes everything look bold. It mostly looks better, even on a CRT, but only for normal or bolded text; italicized text looks _terrible_, and it very hard to read.

There's only two things I want from IE7 as a designer: antialiased fonts and PNG alpha channel support. I doubt I'll get either.

Well, there is a font setting in Windows to emulated antialiases fonts that works well enough (but it'll never look like text on a Mac). I'd say forget that for sure - that belongs in the OS, not in an application.

PNG alpha channel - already in there, officially, per the IE team. w00t!, etc.

Re:first look - running dialogue

[iamlucky13]

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.

Re:first look - running dialogue

[naasking]

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.

Ad blocker?

[dada21]

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

Looks nice but....

[jerryodom]

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.

Seamonkey

[stecoop]

I still like seamonkey better http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/news.htm l

pre-install note:

[Tumbleweed]

You must do the 'Windows Genuine Advantage' thingy before it'll install.

Re:pre-install note:

[grcumb]

"You must do the 'Windows Genuine Advantage' thingy before it'll install."

Ok, that explains it. I figured the mirrors were just slow:

user@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install msie7
Password:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package msie7
user@ubuntu:~$

Had A Chance...

[u16084]

I had the chance to preview... PNG support is there... Still lots of page rendering errors, (slashdot) is one example... page scrolls for ever... tabbed browsing is sweet... some security tweaks.. Once completed...

Beta? Microsoft?

[rsborg]

Hasn't Google trademarked that term? >

Seriously, IE *is* playing catchup. Some will say that this is the end of an IE only net.

Others say that all Microsoft has to do is to just be "good enough" and they can keep their near-monopoly market share of the browsing environment.

One thing that's for sure is that Microsoft is no longer the "apparent" force for innovation that they were in the 90's.
And that tabbed browsing (eg: MDI done properly) is here to stay :-)

FC4

[czarangelus]

I'm going to beta test it right now... in Fedora Core 4. And I'm gonna send an error report if it doesn't work, too.

Re:Ad blocker? Not true

[Tumbleweed]

No - I just loaded a site with google ads and they showed up just fine. At least, for their regular text ads, not the rumoured upcoming graphics/flash ads. I don't know if those are even out yet, though.

IE Is Still an Alzheimer's Patient....

[Muad'Dib129]

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.

Re:IE Is Still an Alzheimer's Patient....

[Mr. Underbridge]

Firefox is using just 24.8MB of memory.

Did you know that the abbreviation for gigabytes is GB, not MB?

Preview tab is sweet

[twbecker]

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).

Re:ACID2 test? Not even close.

[Tumbleweed]

IE7 ACID 2 test screenshot - I just loaded it, and did this screenshot. Not even close, though that shouldn't be a surprise - MS has already said it wouldn't pass the test. FF doesn't pass it either, mind.

Just FYI

[GillBates0]

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.

Re:News?

[Bogtha]

News coverage of when the final release is due is meaningful to users and web developers.

This is the first beta with the rendering engine changes in (CSS fixes, HTML improvements, PNG alpha channel support, etc). And it would be a bit late for web developers to check for compatibility and report bugs after the thing has been released, wouldn't it? No, this is the right time for Slashdot to report this.

Doubt I'll switch back

[Pedrito]

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.

Eh, too little too late

[finkployd]

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

How to bypass the WGA (really)

[acariquara]

1. Get the hacked iecustom.dll (google for it)
2. Download the beta. DO NOT RUN IT
3. Using WinRAR or 7Zip, unpack the executable (right click it)
4. Go to the "update" subfolder
5. Replace iecustom.dll with hacked one
6. Run UPDATE.EXE (not setup.exe)

done.

Why should MS care?

[mmalove]

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?

Re:Why should MS care?

[AnotherDaveB]

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?

It's easier to develop for browsers that follow the w3c dom/html/css standards. IE6 has a number of weird bugs that make it a pain.

I think MS is more concerned that corporate intranets might start developing for FF rather than IE6, than any perception among the general public that IE6 a poor quality product.

Fixed attribute

[mla_anderson]

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

Re:Fixed attribute

[eggz128]

Are you sure? The original Complex Spiral works for me.

Re:ACID2 test? Not even close.

[bahamat]

For comparison purposes, here are also:

The reference rendering.
Safari rendering I captured with Grab.

Browser is the Operating System

[Aesiq]

Did Microsoft go out if its way to make sure we all knew that the browser was an integral and non-seperable part of the operating system just so it couldn't be "extra" sued by the U.S. government? Does this mean this is a beta of Vista for free download?!

Awesome!

Configure Clear Type properly

[yotaku]

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

Wake me up when...

[Dracos]

These things are fixed:

• Box Model
• Float Model
• PNG transparency
• position: fixed
• Well, CSS in general
• Event Model
• DOM support
• Mime type: application/xml+html
• Mixed namespace documents

Which basically begs the question, "Will IE ever 100% support any standard?" Sadly, the answer is probably not. IE doesn't even fully support HTML 3.2.

Default Search engine

[sleepophile]

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...

"QuickTabs" looks good

[sootman]

The tour shows a feature called "QuickTabs" that looks good. If I'm correct, it looks like Expose for your tabs--shows thumbnails of all open tabs. Shiira for OS X has this and it's great--something every browser should have.

Re:No need to use ACID...

[GeekDork]

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.

My take

[astrosmash]

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.