IE 7

So I installed IE 7 Beta 2 today. My initial reaction is... It's about time.

Don't get me wrong, this is a really nice improvement over IE 6. Most of the improvements, however, will seem quite obvious to you (especially if you have used Firefox or Netscape).

The tabbed browsing is a little nicer in IE mainly due to the ability to view a screenshot of all your tabs and quickly switch to the tab you want (I would always just end up clicking all the tabs in Firefox until I find the one I want). I was happy to see IE uses CTRL+T to open new tabs.

Here's a screenshot of this fast switching in action:

This new version of IE provides a lot more screen space for the webpages and next-to-nothing taken up with obtrusive toolbars.

There is also a search box in the top right that can be configured to use whatever search engine you want (although it defaults to MSN search engine, at least they don't FORCE you to use it!)

There are a number of available plug-ins for the browser. I haven't really looked into what is available. I think you can add security features (like parental control software), or entertainment things. I don't think I will be doing any plug-ins since I anticipate it slowing the browser down.

On that note, this version of IE seems faster than IE 6 (this comes as no surprise). But it also seems faster than Firefox and Netscape as well.

If you try it out, let me know what you think.

-J