IE7 Beta 2 Reviewed

Microsoft released the beta version of the upcoming Internet Explorer 7. In short, it still sucks. I’m a huge fan of Firefox and after testing the Beta 2 for IE7, I think I always will be. As it was downloading I clicked on the “Check out the new features in the tour” link below the “Download” link and it brought me to this page:

This won’t be very encouraging and definitely not very convinving to any Firefox user, but the page looks fine in IE. If they are trying to convert Firefox users, they should think about making it look good in both browsers. So I went ahead and installed the program even though I wasn’t very impressed and loaded up the About Me page of this website. I let you judge which browser it looks better in, but my vote goes to Firefox. My first thoughts were filled with confusion and disgust. In my opinion the new design isn’t that great and why does it look so much different from IE6? The text is wierd looking. I don’t know how else to explain it but it also makes the dark grey words look almost purplish. Maybe it’s my monitor but I’ve never had that problem before.

The Things I Liked

I was glad to see that it now has much better CSS support but I’ve noticed there are still some errors that were also present in IE6. They have finally adopted tabbed browsing and RSS integration which is handy and much more convenient since everyone seems to have a blog these days. They announced earlier that they would be using the same feed icon used by Firefox and many other browsers and I’m glad they did.

With all the things I like about the new version of Internet Explorer there is one commonality in all of them. They are all included in the current version of Firefox or have been included for a long time! All Microsoft has done is create a worse version of Firefox. For those of you still using Internet Explorer, please switch. You don’t even need to switch to Firefox just something other than Internet Explorer. I encourage all IE users to check out the Browse Happy website and choose a browser that is better for you.