MSIE Beta 7

MS Internet Explorer 7 with Favorites Center open showing RSS feeds

The MS Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 runs (well, perhaps more sort of jogs) on my 700Mhz Dell L400 laptop. I had to do the software update to get the .NET framework and a few other things before downloading the beta package itself. I think Microsoft verified that my copy of Windows XP SP2 was genuine about 5 times. I particularily cherish having my OS verified to get to the download link for MS Internet Explorer beta 7, and then when the installer runs… yup, it verifies the OS again. None of this pinko Open Source pass copies round stuff here!

You get tabbed browsing and RSS feeds in a side pane… sort of like Netscape SeaMonkey. There is a cute Expose like Quick Tabs view that will show minature thumbnails of the state of all the loaded tabs: I suppose that is a preview of a Vista feature. The Page drop down menu has a Zoom feature – the page including graphics can be zoomed up to 400% and this will help when projecting Web sites. The familiar Text Size control appears not to scale text within any kind of CSS DIV even ones that do not use pixel based sizes; unstyled pages can have text size changed.

When the final version ships a lot of my colleages on College managed systems will be able to subscribe to RSS feeds that they choose and prioritise. Intranet by RSS? Why not; have a server pushing out XML and then teachers can tune into the feeds they need – instant personalisation. I just hope that the final version has the menu bar at the top of the window like most other Windows applications.

Some of the HTML rendering is a bit strange (including the search box on this site when using the Kubrick theme) but we are used to MS having fun with CSS standards. The MS Internet Explorer beta replaces your MS Internet Explorer 6 installation – you can’t do side by side testing of versions on sites other than by having a second computer.

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