With release of Internet Explorer 7 beta 2, Microsoft moves a step closer to delivering at long last a significant new version of its Web browser. By the time Microsoft actually ships the production version of IE 7, an event scheduled for the latter half of 2006, it will have been five years since Microsoft released IE 6 a period during which savvy Web users have increasingly been turning to alternative browsers like Firefox and Opera.
I switched to Firefox myself quite a while ago, in large part because tabbed browsing was too convenient to pass up. While MSN offers a downloadable toolbar that adds tabbed browsing to IE 6, I've found it clunky and unsatisfying. With IE 7, MS finally makes the leap to tabbed browsing. Even given the users switching to Firefox and Opera, it's still worth noting that by sheer dint of IE's still-dominant market share and availability through Windows Update, it's likely to be the browser that introduces tabbed browsing to the computing masses. Continue reading
Keeping Tabs on the Web
IE 7 implements tabbed browsing well, with informative help for novice users and unique features like the Quick Tabs view, which shows graphical thumbnails of all open tabs. Like Firefox, IE 7 lets you bookmark an entire tab set at once or define a whole tab set as your home "page."
IE 7's tabs fit well into a spare new look that eliminates traditional menus and toolbars in favor of a small set of simple icons. You can, however, reinstate menus and toolbars if you like I've turned the Links toolbar back on so I retain one-click access to some essential Favorites.
Included in the new toolbar area is a search box that lets you kick off searches at MSN or Google, or any of a number of other third-party search providers. Fortunately, Microsoft doesn't try to lock you in here. The search box also lets you find text within a page, but I'm deeply disappointed that it doesn't provide incremental search the way Firefox and Opera do. Incremental search lets the browser begin looking for a word before you've even finished typing it often you won't need to type in the entire term to get the right result.
IE 7 automatically detects RSS feeds on pages and lets you subscribe to those feeds and view them in the browser. This feature may not replace a dedicated RSS reader for serious RSS aficionados, but it does seem likely to introduce a large number of new users to the benefits of RSS. You can view all your feeds or your favorites or history in a panel that looks like a tweaked version of IE 6's Explorer bar. Continue reading
Ease of Use
A variety of additional usability changes are subtler but also welcome. IE 7 automatically shrinks Web pages to fit your printer's paper size, and it provides a real print-preview mode with margins you can drag. When browsing, you can zoom in and out on any page re-sizing both text and graphics by holding down the Control key while you spin the mouse wheel. Zooming doesn't actually change the page layout, so you may end up with horizontal scroll bars, but holding down the Alt key while rotating the mouse wheel now scrolls left and right. IE 7 also offers a one-stop way to delete personally identifying information like browsing history and cookies.
IE 7 also has some features aimed at meeting the needs of Web developers, such as per-pixel alpha-channel transparency in PNGs, improved CSS support, and native support for the XMLHTTPRequest object sometimes used in so-called AJAX applications. Continue reading
Safety
New features aside, Microsoft asserts that it has made significant strides in IE's security. IE 7 gives you more control over ActiveX controls and includes anti-phishing and anti-spoofing technology, as well as a variety of low-level architectural changes intended to help prevent attacks. These efforts are clearly a step in the right direction, though it remains to be seen how effective they will prove to be once IE 7 has been widely deployed.
How well does IE 7 beta 2 handle real-world Web sites? It's not perfect. For example, in PC Magazine's online discussion forums, IE 7 doesn't properly display input forms a problem we documented in our first preview of IE 7. At bloglines.com, IE 7 partially obscures the scroll bar on the navigation frame. And some sites explicitly deny access to IE 7 because they haven't fully tested its behavior. Google Calendar, for example, won't work with it; neither will my bank's Web-based account access. So you'll still want to keep another browser around in the meantime.
IE 7 also seemed to lose track of some of my cookies or saved passwords when I upgraded, so I had to re-enter credentials on a number of my favorite sites.
At this point, IE 7 looks like a solid improvement over IE 6, with new features and security that will be welcome to millions of users. Still, I'm not convinced that it offers enough to wean me off of Firefox, particularly with its lack of in-page incremental search.
For a close-up look at some of IE 7's features, take a look at our IE 7 slideshow. Like what you see? You can download Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 for yourself here.
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