I downloaded the second beta of IE7 today. It does have tabs and it does do transparent PNGs, but like its predecessor, it still messes up a lot of pages that use standards compliant CSS. It is messing up the page on which I am writing this entry on! The max-width property still hasn’t been implemented, and it displays input objects strangly. The user interface is very new and strange, especially for someone who has been using browsers with the standard interface since 1998… For example, it dosen’t have any menus at the top. On the toolbars, the first one only has back, foward, the address bar and a search box, plus small icons for refresh and stop that took a while for me to find, as being so small, they don’t really grab your attention. Then comes the tab bar, and at the end is the home, print etc.
The printing interface is excellent as you have a lot of control, but it can’t print styles, which makes it a lot less cool.
All in all, its better than IE6, but it still lacks a lot of features that firefox users have come to take for granted. Sorry Bill, but the cool printing feature and redesigned UI is not going to convince me to switch. Also, I’m sure that by the time that M$ releases the final version of IE7, there will be new versions of Firefox and Safari that match all the new features, and also add more.
Rating: 4.5 out of 10
-Stephen
