IE7 beta redux
First I would like to complain for a bit. This isn't a "public" beta
release. Microsoft only made it available to people with a MSDN
subscription. So I thought, okay I have one, let's have at it. But no.
Of course, I couldn't download it with my subscription. The communicative powers of Microsoft failed to mention what level of subscription you needed.
Thanks
to the fact that people on the internet are, unlike Microsoft, very
communicative, I got my hands on a copy the very next day.
The 10mb download took its time to install. After rebooting the computer, I had a go at testing.
What
immediately catches the eye is the lay-out. It doesn't hold up to
Microsoft conventions. The tabs are above the standard menu, which
makes it difficult to locate. The tabs feature seems to be directly
copied from Mozilla Firefox. Scroll wheel click on a link opens the link in a new tab, control-T opens a new tab, etcetera. After opening a tab,
the rendering screws up for some reason.
I was delighted to
discover all my IE CSS hacks still work. This also means that there
have been no changes to the rendering engine. No surprise there, but
good to know we won't be stranded in CSS limbo just yet.
Microsoft
also lifted the idea of integrated search box from its competitors. A
positive point about that: It defaults to Msn search, but four other
search engines are pre-defined, including Yahoo and Google. I couldn't
find ways to add search engines quickly though.
One final gripe is the complete lack of Atom support. The feedreader solely supports RSS, which I think is a big mistake.
Let's
hope this Beta is only the first step, and the actual finished product
will fix most of the UI and support problems, or they might as well not
have bothered building this thing.