Internet Explorer 7.0 (beta)

The beta version of IE7 released today by Microsoft is meant for developers and tech enthusiasts, and it's a good thing. This is not (yet) a browser for the faint of heart; in fact, if you've become accustomed to the minimalist approach of alternative browsers like Firefox, IE7 might actually feel like a step backward. The product's proper name—which should tell you most everything you need to know—is Internet Explorer 7.0 for Windows XP SP2 Beta 2 Preview. We'll refer to it simply as IE7 beta, though.

Though the browser is publicly available, we recommend that general users stay away for now and let developers identify the fledgling browser's foibles. (Microsoft told us to expect a consumer beta "soon.") To put this advice into context, six of the eight PC Magazine editors and analysts who tried the beta uninstalled it within two days.

While significantly trimmer than the most bloated configuration of IE6, the IE7 beta is still not the lean, mean, fast, and clean browser that Firefox 1.5 is, and with Firefox 2.0 due out by mid-2006, Microsoft may lose even more ground to the upstart. The core Firefox 1.5 application itself is less than 5MB, while this hefty hunk o' code weighs in at almost 11.5MB. By comparison, IE6 SP1 can range anywhere from 11MB to 75MB depending on the configuration you choose.
The most noticeable thing about IE7 beta is the lack of a traditional navigation bar. Both IE6 and Firefox use the upper left corner, where most Westerners first look when reading a book or Web page, for Back, Forward, Home, Refresh, and Stop buttons. IE7 breaks the mold, and that takes some getting used to. The Back and Forward buttons are still in the upper left corner, but the Stop and Refresh buttons are now in the upper right, and Home is two rows down on the right.
In fact, once you get down to the second row, it's a whole new ball game. Here you'll find a star-emblazoned button labeled Favorites Center. Clicking on it opens a side window with three tabs, one each for displaying your favorites, your current RSS feeds, and your history. Next to this is the add/subscribe button for adding RSS feeds. The RSS reader is functional if unexceptional, but because the vast majority of Internet surfers use IE, even without a lot of the bells and whistles of more advanced readers, IE7 could be a catalyst for widespread RSS adoption. And adding RSS feeds from your favorite site is simple—just two clicks.
We're happy to see that this release allow for tabbed browsing, and we like the Quick Tabs button that puts miniature versions of all your open tabs in a single window. You can also save groups of tabs for simultaneous launch, letting you load multiple home pages at startup, for instance. Zoom controls smoothly increase the size of both the text and images of the pages displayed. And IE7 beta is perceptibly faster than IE6, though we didn't notice much difference between IE7 and Firefox.
You'll also find more mundane improvements. We certainly applaud the shrink-to-fit option you'll find among the print choices. Quite a few trees have lost their lives to pages that had to be reprinted in landscape mode after printing in portrait mode cut off important text.
The Microsoft crew that showed us the latest IE emphasized that Redmond completely rewrote the code for its rendering engine. The new engine had a lot of glitches, though, and hampered our browsing abilities in some cases. While main pages for most Web sites loaded just fine, you'll notice that some specialty applications, blogs, and tools might be rendered incorrectly. For instance, the browser had problems when it rendered—or rather didn't render–the text within our own PCMag.com forums application. The browser lost all our formatting controls and also shrank the text box. And using the quote feature made the posts virtually illegible due to all the raw HTML code filling the window.
We also miss a search-as-you-type feature you can use when conducting a search of a Web page (also known as word-wheeling), something we've grown to love in Firefox, Yahoo! Desktop Search and X1. We thought the lack of word-wheeling odd, since you'll find it in many areas of the beta builds of Vista we've looked at thus far, and it's even available in IE7 when searching RSS feeds. For general page searches, though, you'll have to content yourself with a standard old-timey find/search dialog box.
Microsoft seems to be more open and solicitous about improving security in the new browser. The initial post-install load page asks you to turn on the automatic Phishing Filter and participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program, for instance, and most Active X controls are disabled by default. The company is touting a number of other security improvements, though several will only be available in the Vista version of IE7. One such advance is Protected Mode, which puts the browser into a limited-privilege state that prevents write to the IE7 cache without explicit user permission. We'll also have to wait for Vista for Parental Controls.
Stay tuned for update reviews. In the near term (read months) Microsoft expects to roll out a broad consumer beta of IE7. And look for the final version of IE7 sometime in the second half of 2006. We do like much of the look and feel of the new browser, even if a lot of it seems to be me-too features imported from competing products. Overall, given Microsoft's timeline and presumed budget for the new browser, it's disappointing that this first beta version of IE7 feels more like a catch-up than a truly innovative new product.

While we are only encouraging developers to download it at this point you can find the
IE7 beta download here.