I've been testing IE7 for several months now. Originally, I had the Beta 1 version installed on one of my test machines running XP. When I started testing Vista, I tried it on there as well. Since the public beta came out almost two months ago, I've been running that both on my test machine and my primary machine for testing purposes. So far, I haven't run into any major problems.

For anyone who has been using Firefox, Opera, or Netscape, IE7 will seem very familiar. Features such as tabbed browsing, RSS feeds, and a built-in search bar have been added to IE7. Of course, some of this is funny since I heard rumors that MS said they would never add tabs to IE. Oh well, I guess you just have to do what the customers want, eh? One item that IE7 adds is the ability to see a small screenshot of all the currently opened tabs. Opera has something similar, but Opera actually displays them as separate windows that you can maximize, tile, or cascade. In IE7, they are just like overgrown thumbnails you can click on to maximize. Performance isn't anything to sneeze at and the changes to the CSS support seem to mess up how my web site is displayed. Go figure...and it isn't even CSS compliant! :(

Overall, it will bring a lot of the cool features that have been in browsers for a number of years to the mindless sheep of the world. It should be interesting to see if any of the browsers decide to implement something similar to IE7's page of tab previews...MS might just decide to sue them! Gotta love that whole "freedom to innovate" argument...

Posted by Curt at March 4, 2006 11:11 PM