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I installed Internet Explorer Beta 2 at work today. We had the executable for the installer just sitting there, so I figured I’d install it, if for no other reason than that it will eventually become the current version, and being in Tech Support, I would be better off knowing its nuances.

Lo and behold, it’s a browser. It seems that they intend that people use this product to navigate the World Wide Web — which makes the name “Internet Explorer” a little odd, but this has been commented on ad naseum. By doing so, they are actually going into competition with Mozilla’s Firefox, so I don’t think they are going to do very well, but you’ve got to hand it to them for trying.

1. They seemed to have fixed a lot of CSS issues. It’s not perfect, but almost all of Eric Meyer’s css/edge works perfectly, which is as good an acid test as any other if you’re in a hurry. I haven’t tested any specific issues, like some of the peculiarities in the way IE used to account for borders in element widths, but at a glance it is, at least, better
2. If you put your mouse up near the last tab (yes, it has tabs, I think everyone knew that was coming), you can automatically create a new tab by clicking the icon that appears. Not bad.
3. Each tab has its own “close” X, in the style of Apple’s Safari browser. We wouldn’t want to copy Firefox for everything, after all. ;-)
4. If you have multiple tabs open, there is a little icon which appears before your tabs, which, if clicked, will show a thumbnail of each tab you have open. I sort of like this; though, I don’t give it long before someone codes a Firefox extension to do this (if someone hasn’t already).
5. IE 7 seems to have the ability to create extensions, also much like Firefox. They are calling them “browser add-ons”, but they appear to be about the same. I’m not sure yet exactly how extensive the API for this is; that is, could you write something like Greasemonkey for IE? At any rate, it’s good for them that they added this; they wouldn’t even be competitive without it.
6. The default theme is not appealing, at least to me, and I haven’t checked to see if IE 7 offers themes.

That’s it for my list of observations. Honestly, I’ve no intention of actually using this product very much — nothing against Microsoft (no, really… stop laughing at me), but they’d have to do a lot more than “catch up” to make me dispense with Firefox.