New IE7 Logo

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

First off, I want to thank Microsoft for giving us early information on this. I spoke with Gary Schare, Director of IE Product Management at Microsoft. As of right now, you can download the Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Public Preview HERE. I installed the software, and although I will say it’s still buggy (more on that later), it’s definitely a step in the right direction for Microsoft. You can expect a full review later in the week, as I play with this release more. Note: it requires Windows XP SP2 … and 32-bit. There will be a later beta release for 2003 Server as well as a 64-bit version released later.

What to Expect:
As opposed to the refresh of Internet Explorer which occurred with SP2, which was security-centric, IE7 has three areas of focus: security, user interface, and an improved platform. We’ll take a quick look at each of these; details can be found on Microsoft’s website.

Security:
The two most obvious changes are a built-in phishing filter and new ActiveX defaults. If you turn on the phishing filter, it will scan a page automatically when you browse to it, and compare it against information from Microsoft on servers that are fraudulent. The info is updated several times an hour. I tried this, and didn’t see any appreciable browsing slowdown. You can also turn it off and run the scan manually. Meanwhile, ActiveX functionality is pretty much disabled by default, to protect against malware. There are other changes, as well.

Platform Changes:
Besides increasing standards compliance, these changes are also supposed to facilitate innovative Web and application development. The biggest change here, at least in discussions with Microsoft, is the Windows RSS Platform, which is part of the IE7 release. It provides “rich functionality for downloading, storing and accessing RSS feeds across the entire operating system and will enable more users to take advantage of RSS-related innovation. Support for the Windows RSS Platform means that once a user subscribes to a feed in one application, that subscription and all the associated content will be made available across the operating system to any application available to make use of it.”

IE 7 Toolbars without Classic Menu

User Interface: Tabs
The most obvious change is tabbed browing. But there are significant changes to just the menu and toolbar sections. For example, if you want, you don’t even need to have the Classic Menu (“File, etc.”) available. You can see a screenshot of the UI without the Classic Menu above. You can run everything by the toolbars that are available by default (Classic Menu is considered a toolbar and is enabled by default also, but you can easily remove it). Actually, it seems to work in my opinion. You don’t really need the menu area with the way they have it set up. It’s very intuitive and efficient. They’ve also added a Search Box as part of the standard toolbars.

–Favorites Center takes the place of the old Favorites. It centralizes the “old” Favorites, as well as Tab Groups (groups of tabs that will be opened at once), browsing history and RSS Feeds. I found it very easy to use.

–RSS Feeds are another key addition. There’s an icon on one of the toolbars that changes when a feed is discovered a site. If you click on the icon you can drop-down a list of feeds and subscribe that way. Pretty easy to use.

–Quick Tabs is a preview of all the available tabs. It displays thumbnail views of all the tabs in a single window.

My favorite is (finally) Advanced Printing including Shrink-To-Fit. One of the most irritating things of IE is printing a web page that gets cut off on the right-hand side. This is a very common complaint. Shrink-To-Fit finally eliminates that problem. There are other features, like multipage print preview with Live Margins, and more.

Questions: I had some questions for Microsoft, and received some answers :-)

a) Are there any plans to resurrect IE for the Mac? Currently IE is developed by the Windows group and there are no plans to port IE to any other OS besides Windows.

b) Are there any plans to add blocking of ads besides pop-up ads? No, there are no plans at this time.

c) Can we get an updated release date for IE7? Currently IE7 will have another public beta preview within the first half of this year. After that, release is scheduled for the second half of the year, to coincide with the release of Windows Vista, though not necessarily at exactly the same time.

d) How has the strength of alternative browsers such as Firefox affected your development? There are three “buckets” of users that are targeted by IE7. One is the 85% or so that continue to use IE6. We feel these will be extremely happy with IE7. Second is the group attracted to the tabbed browsing in Firefox and Opera. We feel these users will be impressed with the changes that have been made to IE and will be very interested in it. Finally is the group who is “Anti-Microsoft” and would prefer to use anything that is non-Microsoft in nature.

We Say: One thing I really want is one browser for my PC. I don’t want to be switching back and forth between browsers because I need ActiveX support or something, which is one reason I haven’t adopted Firefox, though IE Tab is starting to make me think. IE7’s a lot better than IE6, but I still prefer Maxthon. Some of this is simply because I’m used to Maxthon, and this might change as I continue to use IE7 and as development continues and bugs are ironed out. One thing: I was pleasantly surprised to see my favorite toolbars supported seemingly without issue by IE7.

Speaking of bugs, don’t forget this is beta software. For example, I was writing an email in Yahoo! mail, and when backspacing to fix a typo, it stopped erasing characters on-screen (though it was still erasing them from the buffer). This was pretty consistent. Also, writing an article here on RTN is an adventure because when posting, it seems to hang up somewhere in the process. I end up with a blank screen rather than the screen I’m used to.

Anyway, I would recommend if you haven’t used a tabbed browser yet that you give this a try. As we saw above Microsoft has three different audiences they are aiming at: a) the IE6 users, b) the alternative browser (Firefox, Opera) users, and c) the audience who wants nothing to do with Microsoft (their words, not mine) :-)

If you fall into a) or b), and definitely a), I would say you should at least give IE7 a shot. Of course, some of this depends on how brave you are with regards to installing beta software. But, the UI changes are significant, and I’m impressed with the RSS integration as well as the security modifications they’ve made. It may not be for everyone, but it definitely puts IE back into the Browser race again.

Alice Adds: Later today we will load more screens and info as it becomes available. We wanted to get this preview up for everyone as soon as possible. Thanks to Michael for doing such a great job. And before you go….try:
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