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IE 7.0 Beta 2 Available to the Public

Posted by Zonk on Tue Jan 31, 2006 02:15 PM
from the download-and-test-for-it-is-enjoyable dept.
Microsoft Internet Explorer The Internet
spyrochaete writes "Microsoft has just made available their latest beta preview build of their Internet Explorer 7.0 web browser. New features such as tabbed browsing and RSS subscription are summarized in an animated tour. MS welcomes feedback at the Internet Explorer 7 newsgroup." There's also a Channel 9 interview available, as well as commentary on the IEBlog. Update: 01/31 19:58 GMT by Z : prostoalex wrote in with a link to a review of the release at PC Magazine.
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[+] Microsoft Releases IE7 Beta 3 277 comments
Kawahee writes "Microsoft has released IE7 Beta 3 to the public. From TechNet Flash: 'As a result of customer feedback, IE7 Beta 3 contains some feature changes in addition to the planned reliability, compatibility, and security improvements. If you've previously installed a beta of IE7, you should uninstall it before installing this release.' For the first time, the Administrator's Kit for Internet Explorer 7 is also available, which is described as 'the most efficient way to deploy and manage Web-based solutions.'"
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IE 7.0 Beta 2 Available to the Public 50 Comments More /

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  • I will repeat my earlier sentiment. Windows update with tabs and RSS, yipee!

    Once again I will return to browsing the internet with Firefox.

  • Way to lead the pack MS!!!!

    http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]
  • How do they fare in the ACID2 test, compared to their old bloody (everything's red, it must be blood!) result? Can anyone post a screenshot?

  • first look - running dialogue (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tumbleweed (3706) * on Tuesday January 31 2006, @02:20PM (#14609387) Homepage
    Okay, first start it up, and you get a web site with a broken image and 'errors on page'. Nice.

    Somewhat goofy interface, reminiscent of Opera. Oy. How do I turn off these cartoony buttons?

    Built-in phishing protection = good

    Okay, load the company's homepage:

            Layout seems perfect.

            Uhoh - dig the heavy main font; THAT ain't right. Something as basic as font weight is fucked up? Very bad. It looks like everything is bolded now. :( The fonts _look_ nice, though, unless they're italic, then they're hard to read. Definitely some font issues going on here.

            It's also slower with the menu changing background colours. Probably because of debugging code in the beta. I hope.

            Okay, quick check to see if IE6 is still on here...aaaannddd...of course not. Fuckers. Okay, let's check in Firefox, yep, what I thought. IE7 is messing up some of the menu's CSS effects - sometimes putting an underline under some of the items when it shouldn't. Still beta, so no biggie.

            Okay, load company site 2:

            More sophisticated layout, layout still fine. Good.

            Okay, load company site 3:

            Much more sophisticated layout, and front page layout looks fine, but visited link colour is wrong.

    Built-in close-tab X on each tab, but only when focused on that tab. Better than default FF behaviour, but they should take a look at Tab Mix Plus extension features.

    Okay, let's check the Options!

    Popup blocker defaults to off? Bleh.

    Prompt to save passwords on forms defaults to off? Bleh.

    AHA - font problem solved - installing IE7 turns on ClearType: MONDO STUPID. Turn of ClearType, restart, fonts are back to normal. Whew.

    Okay, so, it seems to load Slashdot well enough.

    It remembers many IE6 settings, but others (like preferred fonts) it does not. Not a biggie for a beta.

    So, all in all, not bad for the first public beta.

    Same ctrl-T to open new tab as in FF. Bueno.
    • not bad for the first public beta.
      Isn't this just a preview of Beta 2? I head the final Beta 2 will be out in April.

    • Prompt to save passwords on forms defaults to off? Bleh.

      I very strongly feel that saving passwords on forms should be off by default, given the number of shared computers out there (why not handle that option during the "advanced user" install?). I recently sat down at a computer in a school lab and the Gmail login page loaded up with someone elses username and password already filled in, no doubt because they'd gone to login, and the dialog had popped up asking them if they wanted it to remember their pas

    • Everyone's eyes have different sesitivities to different light wavelengths. Since cleartype uses different colors with the layout of the colored pixels of your monitor, it should be configured for each monitor and user to provide the best results.

      Link to online cleartype calibration site:
      http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tune r/Step1.aspx [microsoft.com]

    • Built-in phishing protection = good

      Actually, it's horrible. It submits every URL you try to access to MS for verification. Same with the Google toolbar in fact, except the latter is even worse because it submits it over an unencrypted connection. These anti-phishing efforts break the current semantics of the web. These efforts are seriously misguided and truly disheartening, particularly when there are perfectly good anti-phishing tools that do things right [mozilla.org].
      • Quick question for you: does IE7 antialias text normally? Or is it a ClearType-only thing? I understand ClearType to be only for LCD panels. (Also, what do you hate about it? I've never used it myself.)

        It IS only for LCD panels, though some people will tell you it also works on CRTs: not true. There are no subpixels on a CRT. If you have a discerning eye, you'll hate it on a CRT. What I don't like about what it does to text on a CRT: it makes everything look bold. It mostly looks better, even on a CRT, but

  • Ad blocker? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dada21 (163177) * <adam.dada@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 31 2006, @02:20PM (#14609393) Homepage Journal
    Some AdSense advertisers are complaining that IE7 has a built in adblocker specifically targetting Google's ads. Can anyone confirm this?
  • Doesn't bode well when I'm getting Javascript errors at the IE7 tour page and in the tour pages. I do like the quick tabs. They seem like they'll be pretty useful. Lets hope the the security measures really help secure our PCs and not open us up to new attacks.

  • Seamonkey (Score:2, Informative)

    by stecoop (759508)
    I still like seamonkey better http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/news.htm l [mozilla.org]
    • Well done! Looks like you just predicted the /. future:

      COMING UP NEXT ON SLASHDOT:
      SeaMonkey 1.0 Released
      Posted by Zonk in The Mysterious Future!

  • pre-install note: (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tumbleweed (3706) * on Tuesday January 31 2006, @02:22PM (#14609415) Homepage
    You must do the 'Windows Genuine Advantage' thingy before it'll install.

    • Re:pre-install note: (Score:4, Funny)

      by grcumb (781340) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @02:39PM (#14609644) Homepage Journal

      "You must do the 'Windows Genuine Advantage' thingy before it'll install."

      Ok, that explains it. I figured the mirrors were just slow:

      user@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install msie7
      Password:
      Reading package lists... Done
      Building dependency tree... Done
      E: Couldn't find package msie7
      user@ubuntu:~$

    • How to bypass the WGA (really) (Score:5, Informative)

      by acariquara (753971) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @03:01PM (#14609933) Journal
      1. Get the hacked iecustom.dll (google for it)
      2. Download the beta. DO NOT RUN IT
      3. Using WinRAR or 7Zip, unpack the executable (right click it)
      4. Go to the "update" subfolder
      5. Replace iecustom.dll with hacked one
      6. Run UPDATE.EXE (not setup.exe)

      done.
  • I had the chance to preview... PNG support is there... Still lots of page rendering errors, (slashdot) is one example... page scrolls for ever... tabbed browsing is sweet... some security tweaks.. Once completed...

  • Beta? Microsoft? (Score:3, Informative)

    by rsborg (111459) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @02:23PM (#14609430) Homepage
    Hasn't Google trademarked that term? >

    Seriously, IE *is* playing catchup. Some will say that this is the end of an IE only net.

    Others say that all Microsoft has to do is to just be "good enough" and they can keep their near-monopoly market share of the browsing environment.

    One thing that's for sure is that Microsoft is no longer the "apparent" force for innovation that they were in the 90's.
    And that tabbed browsing (eg: MDI done properly) is here to stay :-)

  • FC4 (Score:5, Funny)

    by czarangelus (805501) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (sutepai)> on Tuesday January 31 2006, @02:23PM (#14609437)
    I'm going to beta test it right now... in Fedora Core 4. And I'm gonna send an error report if it doesn't work, too.
    • When running IE7B2P-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe under Wine 0.9.5 it gives an error message:
      "Unable to find a volume for file extraction.
      Please verify that you have proper permissions."
  • I saw the first beta through my company (has an MSDN subscription) and this version LOOKS alot better, but still hogs a ton of memory. At present time, its using 104MB of ram, 79MB of pagefile space. The only thing I have loaded is this wonderful site: slashdot.org. Firefox is using just 24.8MB of memory. Looks like I'm uninstalling already. The UI is pretty, though.

  • Preview tab is sweet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by twbecker (315312) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @02:31PM (#14609547)
    I like that you can preview all the tabs you have open in one spot, and either switch to them or close them from there. Honestly, I expect that IE7's tabbed browsing will be better than vanilla Firefox. Firefox gets several things wrong out of the box (which are being fixed for FF2.0, and are available in trunk builds now).

  • Just FYI (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GillBates0 (664202) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @02:33PM (#14609568) Homepage Journal
    Just because I know a number of you n3rds here will try to see what the IP address that is reported as a "Phishing website" on the penultimate page of the tour is, I already checked. It belongs to MSFT itself.

    http://207.68.142.106/contoso/enroll_auth.html [207.68.142.106]
    Search ARIN WHOIS for: 207.68.142.106
    OrgName: Microsoft Corp
    OrgID: MSFT
    Address: One Microsoft Way
    City: Redmond
    StateProv: WA
    PostalCode: 98052
    Country: US
    NetRange: 207.68.128.0 - 207.68.207.255
    CIDR: 207.68.128.0/18, 207.68.192.0/20
    NetName: MICROSOFT-CORP-MSN-BLK
    NetHandle: NET-207-68-128-0-1
    Parent: NET-207-0-0-0-0

    I always wanted to see Microsoft blacklist itself in one of it's intricate series of patch releases, security alerts, and spam filters. Now my life is complete.

  • It looks like Microsoft is trying hard to tell they make the web work for me...

    Their struggle is to get a heading on an otherwise mostly empty web page show correctly.

    They fail it. [imageshack.us]

    Seriously, if they can't even make a title graphic look right, just fire your webmasters.

    My brother knew how to do it cross-platform, when he was 13, a multi-billion dollar company don't?

  • Doubt I'll switch back (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pedrito (94783) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @02:40PM (#14609657) Homepage
    I'm not fond of upgrading software. Being a software developer, I often don't have a choice. I often have to make sure I'm using the latest of anything that might be work-related and that includes things like Office and other supporting software.

    But with something like a web browser, I get a choice. I held off on switching to Firefox. I tried some earlier version and while they had nice features, there were too many issues, I wouldn't switch. Shortly before the 1.0 release, I finally made the switch. The two most compelling features for me were the tabbed browsing and the keyworded bookmarks (which I use ALL the time).

    I don't know if IE 7 has the keyworded bookmarks and without it (or something similar), I wouldn't even consider it. But the fact remains that without some compelling new features, I doubt I will switch and from what I've seen so far, there's just nothing like that.

    I suspect a lot of regular users are like that. Without a really compelling reason, they won't switch. I suspect IE 7.0 will fail to turn the tide of people switching to Firefox.

  • Eh, too little too late (Score:3, Interesting)

    by finkployd (12902) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @02:43PM (#14609700) Homepage
    I'm using it now to post this comment, and then I'm switching right back. The toolbar is ugly (granted it is beta), and I'm amused that Yahoo is the default search tool over MSN (google of course is not even an option, after all who searches with that?).

    Rendering is still sub par, tabs are nice though. All in all, it has a strong "welcome to the cutting edge of web browsing, circa 2003" feel to it. Given that Firefox actually has some momentum now even in corporate America, not to mention joe average who is beginning to draw a connection between spyware and IE, I think MS is going to have to do better than a poor Firefox clone to reverse that trend.

    Finkployd

  • Fixed attribute (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mla_anderson (578539) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @03:11PM (#14610038) Homepage
    Still no concept of position: fixed in IE7. Ugh.

  • Wake me up when... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dracos (107777) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @04:02PM (#14610511)

    These things are fixed:

    • Box Model
    • Float Model
    • PNG transparency
    • position: fixed
    • Well, CSS in general
    • Event Model
    • DOM support
    • Mime type: application/xml+html
    • Mixed namespace documents

    Which basically begs the question, "Will IE ever 100% support any standard?" Sadly, the answer is probably not. IE doesn't even fully support HTML 3.2.

  • "QuickTabs" looks good (Score:3, Informative)

    by sootman (158191) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @04:35PM (#14610807) Journal
    The tour shows a feature called "QuickTabs" that looks good. If I'm correct, it looks like Expose for your tabs--shows thumbnails of all open tabs. Shiira [hmdt-web.net] for OS X has this and it's great--something every browser should have.

  • My take (Score:4, Interesting)

    by astrosmash (3561) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @11:01PM (#14613387) Journal
    The Good:
    1. They haven't tried to reinvent the wheel with respect to tabbed browsing and search. They got it mostly right. As a Firefox and Safari user I generally feel at home using IE 7, which is a pleasent surprise.
    2. I like the placement of the new-tab button and close-tab buttons. (Better than Firefox)
    3. Clicking on a web page's orange XML icon brings up an RSS reader instead of dumping raw XML. (Better than Firefox, again)
    4. Real zoom. Try this: view this [wordpress.com] web page in IE7 and hit Ctrl-+ a few times, then do the same in Firefox. Huge difference; beats Firefox again.
    5. Although the old menu bar is gone, the old menu accelerators still work; e.g. Alt-F shows the old menu bar and displays the file menu as expected.

    The Bad:

    1. They *still* don't have smooth scrolling working correctly. In fact, mouse wheel scrolling in general is very slow and choppy. (Actually, it appears to be OK on some sites, crappy on others)
    2. It's a surprising rough release. It's quite slow at loading, scrolling, and resizing, and has crashed a couple of times for no apparent reason. I'm surprised they released it like this, beta or not.
    3. Lots of rendering errors, too. I don't know if that's because of actual bugs, or because IE is *now* rendering correctly and the IE5/6 specific web sites are wrong.
    4. IE *still* doesn't render large tables until the entire table has loaded.
    5. Unacceptably large memory usage (over 70 MB of VM after a few minutes of use)
    6. Draging links or text onto the tab bar or doesn't work as expected; Can't drag text at all onto the tab bar, which is one of may favorite features of both Safari and Firefox.
    7. I don't like the lack of menu bar. I'm dreading the thought of having to explain over the phone to my parents how to open the options dialog.

    Bottom line: There isn't enough here to get me to switch from Firefox (or Safari :p), and if they don't reign in the memory usage I doubt I'll even install it, but when I have to use IE on a friend or co-worker's machine, I'll be very glad if they have IE7 installed.

    • Re:News? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Bogtha (906264)

      News coverage of when the final release is due is meaningful to users and web developers.

      This is the first beta with the rendering engine changes in (CSS fixes, HTML improvements, PNG alpha channel support, etc). And it would be a bit late for web developers to check for compatibility and report bugs after the thing has been released, wouldn't it? No, this is the right time for Slashdot to report this.

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