Internet Explorer 7

Along with using Windows Vista beta 1 this week I have also been using IE7 on both Windows XP SP2 and Vista itself which has IE7 ship along with the beta. Paul Thurrott has a great review of both here. From what I've seen in this early stage of IE7 development it looks like the platform is coming along quite nicely - thank you Firefox for making this possible. The inclusion of RSS and more importantly the inclusion of RSS as a central store for other applications to access and use is welcomed. Much to Dave Winter's (the father of RSS) disgust Microsoft made the decision at the moment to refer to the RSS feeds as just web feeds to avoid any confusion. I tend to agree with Microsoft that web feed is clearer and adding RSS would no doubt confuse the mass market that IE currently supports.

The inclusion of tabbed browsing is an appreciated feature that if you haven't used before you should see immediate improvements in your web consumption. Although I have found it irritating that the close button is at the top right of the tab window in question and not next to the tab itself, I'm sure this is a result of the Window's guidelines for proper UI placement. Paul in his article talks about a number of user interface elements not meeting this guideline to fit in with the new Vista style of doing things. I personally find the refresh button to be in the wrong spot - in place of the go button after a page is loaded and not where it used to be yet this will just take a little getting used too.

For those people wanting to try IE7 out on Windows XP SP2 I recommend using a Virtual Machine with an activated copy of Window's on it (otherwise it will not install). Please don't use this version of IE7 on your main computer or any production machine - it's an early beta! You can get the executable here. Note the download is not from a Microsoft site.