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Microsoft Offers Phone Support For IE 7
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC is running a short piece detailing Microsoft's newest step in testing Internet Explorer 7, which just went into Beta 2 yesterday. They're now offering free phone support to U.S., German, and Japanese users who try out the trial software." From the article: "'We believe that IE 7, even at this beta stage, is a significant improvement and we want as many people as possible to try it and use it,' said the browser development team in a post on its blog. 'IE 7 is feature complete and has been through significant compatibility and reliability testing. People (especially technology enthusiasts) will have a good experience with it,' continued the post. Microsoft said the new version addresses some problems affecting banking and news sites. It is also designed to be more secure than the current version, with built-in protection against malicious software and online phishing scams."
I was absolutely sure they mean it will contain a skype-like application, voice chat, internet telephony.
Nope. Support by phone will be available. MSIE won't support a phone.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Hmm, I just did the acid2 test in both MSIE 7 and Firefox. NEITHER passed it. MS's background is red with a vague happy face shape over on the left side, and although firefox doesn't have the background the image is still all discombobulated.
I've been running beta2 for months now and it actually seems to work better than the previous versions by a long shot. Not nearly as many problems with loading content that has traditionally given IE problems.
The tabbed browsing has a few advantages over firefox's and a few features are yet missing that firefox's tabbed browsing had from it's earliest incarnation. Of course beta 1 of firefox was based off of a heavily tested and proven codebase, and much of IE7 has been a complete rewrite.
It would be nice to right click and "open in new tab" now and then, a feature that is glaringly absent. However I do like the new layout, it took me a while to get used to the fact that the standard button layout was gone, and there was nothing I could do about it, but once I got used to it, it worked well, probably more efficient than my previous surfing experiences. However, there should be an option to use the standard web controls that people have used since the stone age of the world wide web, as my wife, being a neophyte, hates it, and refuses to get used to it. And she cant use firefox on her web applications her work provides because firefox doesn't like cold fusion, so she sort of has to. It would be nice if she could use the familiar interface.
It also seems to load pages much faster than previous versions of IE, and dare I say it *gasp* firefox. One of the first things I tested, out of curiosity. Of course these tests were not scientifically conducted, and results can changed based on connection, and host bandwidth, client bandwidth, etc. etc. but it's competetive in that area.
Prior to downloading the beta, I was getting sick of firefox, and hadn't been having a very good experience with it for a while. Probably because of an extension I loaded or something else completely unrelated to the sacred browser itself, but it seemed to be a resource hog. I have heard there were fixes, and I applied them, but my browsing experience continued to suck. And I was considering buying opera. I figured I'd try ie7 before I went that route since I was considering a change anyway, and so far, nothing has been bad enough to chase me off. I'll continue testing it. However I'll probably still buy opera if they don't add a few features and refine a few they don't already have.
And to the guys at MS, why not make it acid2 compliant? While your at the drawing board, might as well just make the necessary adjustments. One less thing to be critisized over at least, and I doubt it would require huge amounts of sweeping changes.
... what did you expect, something profound?
It seems that they're really pulling off the "still no CSS" stunt. Too bad. Also, IE7 still tries to download properly served XHTML. What a failure.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.