Being a long-time Firefox user, it was hard for me to even muster the desire to grab the latest beta of IE 7 from Microsoft.com but having read some of the buzz on Betanews, I decided to give it a whirl. To say I’m glad I did is an understatement.
The install was quick and painless, and all was running after a reboot. I double clicked the newly-redesigned E logo and figured on waiting a few seconds for it to start up. Much to my surprise, it started almost instantaneously. I started going to various websites and they sprung to life at speeds I have never comprehended before. IE 7 was noticeably fast.
The interface is okay. Kind of weird and quirky, but I have a feeling it’s similar to what we’re going to get in the next major release of Microsoft Office. It’s not the slickest ever, but it’s functional if you’re a web browsing maven and don’t like clutter.
All told, I would’ve happily left IE 7 installed and actually started using it, but there were a fair share of bugs going on. All of them were relatively minor (for example, the user agent string has changed for IE so pages kept telling me I needed IE 6 or later to view them) except for the horrific rendering of some pages (and believe me when I say horrific, that’s what I mean). I’m guessing this is due to MS updating the rendering engine to be more standards compliant, but sites still seeing an IE user agent string and rendering it for the older browsers. I’m sure the MS team will come up with something to straighten that out before the release date.
While IE 7 wasn’t complete or “perfect” enough for me to leave on my system, I have to say it’s an outstanding start for a much-maligned browser. As it stands now, I won’t be switching any time soon. In the future, however, I may consider it if IE 7 is released with some bugs squashed.
It really is that good, and more importantly it really is that fast.
[tags]ie 7, microsoft, firefox[/tags]