Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Reviewed

I installed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 and decided to post my thoughts on it.

Mozilla Firenet Explorer
The Internet explorer 7 browser has taken on somewhat of a Firefox-like interface. It’s Address bar and search toolbars are located along the top just as they are in Firefox, although the tool menus (File, Edit View, etc..) are located below the address bar as opposed to below it in all other windows applications. Unlike current versions of Internet Explorer, The address bar is permanent which will make it harder for malware to remove or replace the address bar. A big plus in my book.

Quick! Look what’s up!
IE7b2 also provides an overview page showing thumbnails of all the web sites open in different tabs. If you’re the type of person who likes to view a lot of websites at one time, it’s very easy for you to switch between tabs when the pages would otherwise be lost.

There’s no place like Home Pages
One feature of Microsoft’s new browser is the ability to have multiple home pages open in different tabs when you initially start it up. This could be exceptionally good for businesses that rely on multiple web-based tools and services (such as the company I am currently employed by).

Feed Me
Upon loading my personal blog (LiveJournal) IE7b2 immediately identified the availability of the RSS feeds and allowed me to subscribe. It was a bit tricky locating the actual links, but by opening my favorites and clicking on the Feeds button, I was presented with a list of all my subscribed feeds. Searching with in my jounral provided instant results. As I typed, entries that did not contain the combinations of letters I was typing were removed leaving me with only relevant entries. Great way of looking up information in large blogs, news sites, etc.

Super-size Me!
In addition to changing the text size on a page, you can zoom the entire page in or out, preserving the design. That’s just cool.

Well, there’s my brief run-down on IE7. I haven’t run into any compatability issues yet, but you can be sure that I will append this review once I find them 🙂 Again, We’ve all seen production Microsoft products fail us, so I don’t recommend installing the Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 on your own, but so far, I like what microsoft has done.