Windows Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2

Now is your chance to see what all the fuss is and will be about. Microsoft released Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7 on the world last night. While its not a final release product, I can tell you it is FAST, feature rich and has good support for RSS.

I'm not too delighted at the feed support as I could be - MS is only supporting RSS at this time, and if you notice on Blogger we have ATOM feeds. Doesn't work right now. Eventually, I may be able to uninstall Pluck which I have used for over a year as my main RSS/ATOM reader. That won't happen yet, but it could when the IE7 ships later this year - we'll see how much better the RSS support gets. That its built in and works rather well already is very promising.

Another irritating thing I've noticed since installing on XP (I've used IE7 on antoher OS...), when trying to create this post here at Blogger using IE7, the "Compose" mode when creating a post does not display text correctly - its white on white! Using the "Edit HTML" mode DOES show the text so you can see it.

Well, its a beta release and it is impressive in the changes and features MS has brought along so far. Also impressive is MS's interest in listening to the user community for feature and usability improvements in IE7. The laundry list from IE6 is long, and MS has worked very hard to build a modern browser.

Is it better than FireFox - probably not, especially in beta, but its a BIG step in the right direction and will continue to improve. Also, I have to admit here that I'm a dedicated IE user, so while I use FireFox (and Opera too!), IE is my main browser and will probably continue to be.

Well, more to come on this as the days roll on!