Skip to main content

IE 7 public preview is out

Microsoft made a preliminary version of its new Internet Explorer 7 browser available for download this morning. It's technically a preview of Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7, and while it's available for anyone to download, the company says it's intended for information-technology professionals, developers and others, not for consumers, as the actual Beta 2 will be. Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch has the details in this post on the IE Blog.

Many of the features have been present in earlier builds of the browser, or in public demonstrations, such as a phishing filter that identifies suspicious sites, and the Quick Tab feature for viewing thumbnails of open Web pages. But for many users, it's the first hands-on experience with IE 7. People have been busy today taking screen shots of the new browser and posting them on sites such as Flickr.

Some of the reactions online so far:

  • Joe Wilcox, Microsoft Monitor: Microsoft has finally reached the point where IE feels like a modern browser. There is much to like about IE 7, but a rough quality remains. I found the Beta 2 Preview to be a little buggier than Beta 1, which would be another good reason to call the build Preview."
  • CNet.com review and slide show: "Hoping to stop the increasing tide of disgruntled surfers switching to Mozilla Firefox and Opera 8, Microsoft has mirrored the look and feel of those other browsers while adding a few unique features to IE 7 for XP SP2."
  • Harry McCracken, PC World: "Mostly, it brings an increasingly antiquated browser up to rough parity with Firefox and Opera, two products which have improved by leaps and bounds during the years that IE has mostly stood still. It does have a few nice features that its rivals don't, but none of them are life-changing experiences. And for me, at least, it retains some old annoyances -- and introduces at least one new one."
  • RealTechNews: "It may not be for everyone, but it definitely puts IE back into the Browser race again."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Does light have mass?

The short answer is "no", but it is a qualified "no" because there are odd ways of interpreting the question which could justify the answer "yes". Light is composed of photons so we could ask if the photon has mass. The answer is then definitely "no": The photon is a massless particle. According to theory it has energy and momentum but no mass and this is confirmed by experiment to within strict limits. Even before it was known that light is composed of photons it was known that light carries momentum and will exert a pressure on a surface. This is not evidence that it has mass since momentum can exist without mass. [ For details see the Physics FAQ article What is the mass of the photon? ]. Sometimes people like to say that the photon does have mass because a photon has energy E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency of the photon. Energy, they say, is equivalent to mass according to Einstein's famous formula E = m...
6 comments
Read more

Play against Xbox360 gamer on PC in Vista

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates on Tuesday announced a cross-platform gaming service that integrates games played on cell phones, Xbox 360 consoles and the upcoming Windows Vista operating system. The "Live Anywhere" service will be available as part of Windows Vista, Microsoft's next-generation PC operating system. The consumer version is scheduled for release early next year. "It means that you have one online community," Gates said in a news conference. "This platform can really unleash developers to do amazing new things." The system would extend the company's existing Xbox Live service for the Xbox 360 console into millions of Internet-enabled PCs and cellular phones. No pricing information on the new service was announced. In recent months, Microsoft has been pushing a number of online services that it hopes will boost revenue as markets for its traditional software become increasingly saturated. The company expects to make money off s...
9 comments
Read more

Microsoft shows off JPEG rival

If it is up to Microsoft, the omnipresent JPEG image format will be replaced by Windows Media Photo. The software maker detailed the new image format Wednesday at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here. Windows Media Photo will be supported in Windows Vista and also be made available for Windows XP, Bill Crow, program manager for Windows Media Photo said in a presentation. "One of the biggest reasons people upgrade their PCs is digital photos," Crow said, noting that Microsoft has been in contact with printer makers, digital camera companies and other unnamed industry partners while working on Windows Media Photo. Microsoft touts managing "digital memories" as one of the key attributes of XP successor Vista. In his presentation, Crow showed an image with 24:1 compression that visibly contained more detail in the Windows Media Photo format than the JPEG and JPEG 2000 formats compressed at the same level. Still, the image in the Microsoft form...
1 comment
Read more