IE7 Beta preview released

Posted on January 31, 2006 One Comment

The Beta 2 preview of Internet Explorer 7 has been released into the wild today.

If you insist on sticking with IE, this seems like the direction to head. Take the little multi-media tour — a lot has changed since the earlier developer version. I’ve just downloaded it, but need to get back to work (*blush*) so will write more later.

[later]

I’ve installed it. Learned that it IS possible to uninstall the earlier beta (I had no clue) and got to reboot a few times, but here I am, using it. And rather impressed.

First, the annoyance: I’m writing this piece for the second time. Why? Because when you use the search thingy, the search results show up in your current window. Argh. There’s got to be away around that.

That aside, my first impression was almost of amazement. The stodgy old IE interface has been pretty radically revamped. It really is quite svelte and, perhaps even a bit spartan. Everything you expect is there. Somewhere. Just likely been reorganized a bit. It took some getting used to, but in general I like it.

Speaking of things I like: “Quick Tabs” rock. Hit the button (or alt-Q) and get a thumbnail view of all your tabs. Click one to jump to it, or click the “x” to close a tab. Sure, there are Firefox extensions to do the same thing but this is quite zippy and works well.

Apparently CSS support isn’t quite done, or the world is continuing to debate the standards. It seems to degrade well though and I’ve heard that some of the old IE css hacks aren’t necessary with IE7 (granted, the world is still on IE 5 and 6).

Microsoft has provided a couple of evaluator checklists that offer further hints of what to look for in this preview: IT Pro Checklist and Developer/Web Developer Checklist. From those checklists I found the IE Developer Toolbar (beta). It looks like it might be interesting to play with as well.

All in all, I’m somewhat enthused about this beta. There’s still some ways to go, but there’s a lot of newness here (I didn’t even touch on some of the security gunk) and it seems a step in the right, albeit somewhat derivative, direction.

Tags: browsers, IE7, microsoft