Raiméis

The Beta 2 Preview of IE7 has been released to the XP SP2-using public. I think the only people actually waiting for this were the self-pleasuring nerds who hang around the MS forums and would cut your throat if you dared diss their favourite browser. Still, I donned my geek cap for a short while to give the browser a quick test drive (and quickly sent it back to the garage).
As well as getting a facelift to give the toolbar a cleaner, streamlined look (it’s nothing special to be honest) they have added a number of other features which IE6 badly lacked; tabbed browsing (the tabs including the ‘new tab’ button are not nice looking at all), quick tabs (like the Mac Éxpose feature), built-in search box and integrated RSS – all of which every other browser has. Support for web standards has improved, security is supposedly much better (it has a phishing filter) but it couldn’t actually get much worse than IE6.

On the plus side clicking an XML icon link on a webpage opens the feed in a RSS reader which beats Firefox. And that unfortunately is the only plus I could find. It’s a slow, clunky, awkward to customize browser which uses a lot of memory and while it is certainly a big improvement on IE6 it still falls way short of Firefox or Opera. There’s nothing new or exciting in there which would encourage me to even open the browser again. In fact I might just uninstall it before the night is over.