IE 7.0 Beta 2 Available to the Public

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.

first look - running dialogue

[Tumbleweed]

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.

Seamonkey

[stecoop]

I still like seamonkey better http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/news.htm l [mozilla.org]

pre-install note:

[Tumbleweed]

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

Had A Chance...

[u16084]

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...

Almost died laughing...

[raxrat]

when I got to the "See how tabbed browsing works" section of the animated tour. Good stuff! As a Safari and Firefox user, I've been using tabs for well over 2 years :)

Beta? Microsoft?

[rsborg]

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 :-)

Re:Ad blocker? Not true

[Tumbleweed]

No - I just loaded a site with google ads and they showed up just fine. At least, for their regular text ads, not the rumoured upcoming graphics/flash ads. I don't know if those are even out yet, though.

Re:ACID2 test? Not even close.

[Tumbleweed]

IE7 ACID 2 test screenshot [interthresh.com] - I just loaded it, and did this screenshot. Not even close, though that shouldn't be a surprise - MS has already said it wouldn't pass the test. FF doesn't pass it either, mind.

Re:ACID2 test?

[verbatim]

Doesn't look too good

http://img92.imageshack.us/img92/4388/ie7b2acid4pw .jpg [imageshack.us]

Re:ACID2 test?

[mattyohe]

The latest version of Safari. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/28/121 5227 [slashdot.org]

Re:first look - running dialogue

[Tumbleweed]

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 only for normal or bolded text; italicized text looks _terrible_, and it very hard to read.

There's only two things I want from IE7 as a designer: antialiased fonts and PNG alpha channel support. I doubt I'll get either.

Well, there is a font setting in Windows to emulated antialiases fonts that works well enough (but it'll never look like text on a Mac). I'd say forget that for sure - that belongs in the OS, not in an application.

PNG alpha channel - already in there, officially, per the IE team. w00t!, etc.

How to bypass the WGA (really)

[acariquara]

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.

Re:ACID2 test?

[Illissius]

In addition to the above, Opera 9 preview 1 almost passes except for a single yellow block which is rendered red. I'd guess even that is fixed in the internal builds by now (and I also have a suspicion there'll be a new preview soon, but that's just me ;).

Re:ACID2 test? Not even close.

[bahamat]

For comparison purposes, here are also:

The reference rendering [webstandards.org].
Safari rendering [imageshack.us] I captured with Grab.

Re:ACID2 test?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh dear...you do know you are linking to the reference page and not the test itself, don't you?

Re:ACID2 test?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/reference.ht ml [webstandards.org] is the reference, not the test. Of course it looks right.

"QuickTabs" looks good

[sootman]

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.

Re:Fixed attribute

[eggz128]

Are you sure? The original Complex Spiral [meyerweb.com] works for me.

Re:Transparent PNG?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gamma handling is as wrong as ever, though. You must use gamma=1/1.96 to match other gamma-less images, html colors, etc. In a correct implementation, gamma=1/2.2 would match.