IE Version 7 Beta - my first look

I've installed IE Version 7 Beta 2 from the public download available. Microsoft doesn't advise consumers to download and use it as it is still in beta. It wants developers and website creators to use it and check for compatibility of sites.

After the first two crashes, the browser is quite stable. My colleague who saw me browsing something asked me why my screen suddenly looks wide and big. That's the first thing you will like about the IE ver 7.0. They have very wisely crunched all the toolbars to under 10-12 cms and you get a wide canvas to view the pages. The forward and backward buttons, refresh and stop buttons are all in line with the address bar. All the other button are in line with the tab headers. Amazing!

I checked our company's website and intranet to make sure that they look fine in the new browser. They look good. I'm sure none of the existing sites need any modifications in their coding because of the new IE browser.

This version of IE ofcourse has, tabbed browsing and support to RSS feeds. I'm not going to write anything about it. I'm only looking at those that are very innovative and will make it better than Firefox. They also have the search box adjacent to the address bar and you can add any search engine of your choice - a la Firefox feature.

I liked the option to choose the place where the temperory files are stored. This is something I badly wanted because everytime my machine became slower I had to check the temperory files. Now that I have moved it to the other drive (not the default C drive), I have the control I wanted. Note: One of the main reason I uninstalled Google Desktop from my machine was it didn't offer me the option to choose where it saves the index files. It saves in the C drive and over a period of time as the index files grow, the PC performance nose dives. I hope Google sets it right soon.

There are too many options available in the advanced settings and it is not for any layman. I will have to study it to see how many of them will really help me.

Will add more as I continue to use this.