IE7 Beta Now Available
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 28th Jul 2005 16:58 UTC, submitted by Varg Vikernes
Internet Explorer Microsoft released it's much anticipated Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 today, but only to MSDN subscribers and a pretty small set of pre-enrolled beta test participants. FlexBeta goes inside the new beta.
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It's pretty good
by on Fri 29th Jul 2005 00:35 UTC

Member since:

Tabs work just like Firefox; same shortcuts, middle-click to open in new tab. Memory footprint is considerably smaller than Firefox. It's faster than Firefox, just like IE6. I like the way the menubar and toolbar are combined. The combined go/refresh/stop button is fine if kind of small and out of the way. It took all of 30 seconds to get used to the changes.

It fails Acid2 in the same spectacular way IE6 does. I've turned the "phishing" protection off because it told me about itself too much. There's a bug in the toolbar that causes it to change size when you change some of the options. Oh, and the option to "open pop-ups in tabs" doesn't seem to do anything; windows set to open a new window still do as do external links (from email, IM, or whatever). I haven't used it enough to discover if it has the same issues as IE6 with stealing focus all the time. The only thing I miss from Firefox is the ability to turn annoying Javascript "features" off. I do not miss Firefox's God awful text entry bugs or the way it eats memory.

Overall, not particularly revolutionary, but on par with Firefox (unless you use a lot of extensions I guess).

Reply Score: 0

RE: It's pretty good
by abraxas on Fri 29th Jul 2005 00:42 in reply to "It's pretty good"
abraxas Member since:
2005-07-07

It's faster than Firefox, just like IE6

Really? Maybe it's the minor tweaks I have done but Firefrox renders pages much quicker than IE6 on my friend's XP machine.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE: It's pretty good
by abraxas on Fri 29th Jul 2005 00:46 in reply to "It's pretty good"
abraxas Member since:
2005-07-07

Overall, not particularly revolutionary, but on par with Firefox (unless you use a lot of extensions I guess).

Not in my opinion. IE still renders pretty badly. I still have to workaround the horrible CSS rendering and the lack of PNG transparencies is annoying to no end. In fact I had to deal with both of those problems today and unfortunately it's a pain to workaound complicated CSS layouts and GIFs just look terrible.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[2]: It's pretty good
by on Fri 29th Jul 2005 02:36 in reply to "RE: It's pretty good"
Member since:

You're right. I meant the user experience and performance is on par with Firefox. I haven't tested the rendering much. I still looks pretty bad.

Reply Parent Score: 0