I installed IE7 Beta 2 today, to see how a new site design worked, and I am quite impressed. The development team seem to have actually thought about how people interact with an application and have made some of the features quite intuitive.For example, the ‘back’ and ‘forward’ lists are now one list, with the current page somewhere in the middle. A good stab has been made at detecting and displaying RSS feeds - in a FF live bookmarks way - and the ‘quick tabs’ view, which is a page showing live thumbnails of all open tabs - is brilliant.
I’m not sure how extensible IE7 will be - they have incorporated user-customisable searches and some other things, but it’s not clear yet how user-customisable IE will be compared to FF. But how many users make any use of extensions and themes in firefox? I would argue that they have the geek browser market cornered and so the battlefield is now home users who simply want something to show webpages.
If this is true, Microsoft may have played a trump card. IE7 will be shipped with the Vista platform, and non-Vista MS machines will be updated through WindowsUpdate. By providing something which works as well as Firefox, Microsoft will prevent non-technical users from jumping ship to Firefox, which I think will struggle to get a foothold in the non-geek browser market.
After running IE 7 Beta 2 for a couple of months now, I’ve found it to be incredibly slow when compared to non-MS browsers. It’s true that it is quicker than IE6 (not saying much!) and that they’ve put some nice features in, but the performance issue is just too great to ignore. I was really hoping for better this time around. Compare it to the latest release of Opera which is lightning fast (even when compared to Firefox) and includes features such as user-customisable searches, a built-in BitTorrent client, much improved tabbed browsing (trash can feature), mouse gestures and session state management. It’s just a shame that some sites still don’t work with Opera properly and I’m forced into using IE as well!