Internet Explorer 7

I've just installed Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 and it's quite interesting. I've always felt in the past that when Mocrosoft have had serious competition they were at their best. They used to be good at stealing other people ideas and making them even better i.e. doing them right.

In my opinion they haven't really done this with IE7. If you take the tabbed browsing it seems a bit half hearted. Why couldn't it work like the tabs in an Excel sheet? I sometimes need to see pages side by side. With tabbed browsing this can be awkward, but only because they don't have the tile and cascade options that you get on most other applications, in particular the Office ones. I've posted this as a suggestion in the microsoft.public.internetexplorer.general newsgroups. Ironically I had to do it using Firefox as I couldn't get IE7 to work!

I also don't like having to go to a tab to close it by hitting the x. This is the feature of Netscape that I dislike - for me Firefox does it better by keeping the x in one place. Microsoft have done it properly in Visual Studio! Can we please have some consistency.

Finally I dislike the bar at the top. I like to have my menus at the top. When I tried to do this I lost them and it took a little while to find how to retrieve them (Tools (button)|ToolBars|Lock Bands). I also prefer the Google toolbar for searching as by hitting a different button I can search Google uk, or Google maps etc.

Recently I was starting to convert to Firefox especially with the IETab extension. Microsoft have done barely enough to make me decide either way.

Having said all this, the look of it is likely to be a hint of what's to come with Vista and on the whole I don't dislike the look, I'm sure I'll get used to it's quirks fairly soon. I've managed to crash it a couple of times but that is to be expected with a Beta. It's also a bit slow but again that is probably because it's a beta. It handles RSS feeds slightly differently to Firefox and I'm not sure if I like that or not. I'll reserve judgement for now.

To my mind one of the best things about it is the anti-phishing tool. Assuming this works as intended it's a brilliant idea.