Grabbed the latest IE 7 Beta from Microsoft today to try out the long-awaited version of the ubiquitous browser. And it’s good. Confused me at first because for some reason it turned ClearType on, but after I found the setting, I played about with the new IE.
The obvious change is the user interface. I’m getting used to it surprisingly quickly, despite it being rough around the edges (as you’d expect) and markedly different from IE 6. I use Firefox for browsing and while this doesn’t manage to overtake its rival, Microsoft do make a valiant attempt to catch up – at last! Printing is fixed, tabbed browsing is here at last, and the nastiest CSS bugs are gone. The new phishing filter also looks promising although I’m sure they’ll be some users who won’t use it on the privacy principle.
One small improvement that I do really like is the ease at which you can enable, disable and remove ActiveX controls. Many of the little things in Firefox that I couldn’t live without, like spell checking, are actually done via extensions which I’m a lot happier installing in Firefox than I am loading a plugin in IE. This might change that and make it easier for Internet Explorer to acquire some of this extra functionality safely. (In fact – ieSpell seems quite promising for spell checking in particular!)
So – anyone willing to try it out too? 
I think I’ll pass
Congratulations Dominic
You have successfully written a blog of which I have understood nothing
i’ll check it out
You taking tips from Nic on the ‘let’s put stuff Lucy can’t comment about’ blogs?
Bah, still no 64 bit version
.
Is it actual CSS2 support though? Will it render my objects, my right:, and my min-widths correctly? 😮
Nathan – sadly, no
They’ve fixed the big bugs (http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html) and there’s a list on their blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx) of some other issues. For CSS2:
"# CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
# CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning" is included.
But not, it appears, min-width
Argh! I’ve downloaded it (twice!, that’s after unistalling the first time) but every time I try and open it, it decides to crash. Sure, BETA version but it’s really annoying me
Any ideas?
(Oh, and I’ve virus scanned too)
Hmm
Do a Spybot scan? Close any running programs? Convert to religion and pray? 