IE7 beta2 preview

[tedster]

How about that -- beta+2+preview all in one offering! At any rate, Microsoft has released a consumer level beta of IE7.
[microsoft.com...]

Warning -- there's some eye bending Flash and darned little information on that page.

[oddsod]

"toolbar search box"

Hehe, polish up your SEO skills for MSN.

[whoisgregg]

eye bending Flash and darned little information

Four sentences and six bullet points have never had it so good.

[tedster]

Sorry about my short tempered criticism of that lovely Flash interface. I note that there are some informative links at the bottom, in particular, a summary of features in improvements:
[microsoft.com...]

[jvmills]

tabbed browsing...

[jonathanleger]

Wow, it sure is pretty. :)

I'm using it now and its interface is far superior to IE6 in terms of space utilization. Still getting used to it, so we'll see how it goes, but at first glance it's nice!

I also like the security-checking features. A website whose security certificate is out of date or has problems (or doesn't exist) appears in the URL navigation bar with a red background so you know when you've hit a potentially insecure site.

It also lets you report sites that you feel are phishing sites, though that has some potential abuse issues.

[RammsteinNicCage]

Features Unique to Windows Vista®
The following features are available only with Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista:

Admittedly, I haven't been keeping up with Vista or IE7, but I thought IE7 was only going to be released with Vista and could not be used on previous versions of Windows... did something change?

Jennifer

[FrostyMug]

can't run it - win2k here

[Hanu]

My condolences. But your are not alone. There are at least as many 2k users as there are bugs in IE6's CSS implementation.

[Kufu]

This is so pathetic. It has the same CSS rendering problems as before.

[RonPK]

Kufu, maybe you should read the IEblog first:

[bugfixes] Peekaboo bug
Guillotine bug
Duplicate Character bug
Border Chaos
No Scroll bug
3 Pixel Text Jog
Magic Creeping Text bug
Bottom Margin bug on Hover
Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
IE/Win Line-height bug
Double Float Margin Bug
Quirky Percentages in IE
Duplicate indent
Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
1 px border style
Disappearing List-background
Fix width:auto

In addition we've added support for the following
HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback
CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
Alpha channel in PNG images
Fix :hover on all elements
Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body

Also, MS has always stated that security improvements had priority over rendering enhancements.

[Kufu]

RonPK,

Come on, after 3 years of development they still can't get it right? Opera does it, Firefox does, why not IE?

I'm not a MS basher/hater (I really like Windows XP), but this is silly.

Maybe I expect too much. :)

[tedster]

IE needs to support all kinds of legacy code -- proprietary stuff in use on many, many corporate intranets, extranets and so on. Their refactoring job is a lot bigger because of this. They developed IE as a (hopeful) application platform rather than just a browser.

And now they have a big bowl of spaghetti.

[MatthewHSE]

I waited in vain for someone to hack Beta 1 to work on W2K. Maybe now that the beta is public, it will happen. All things considered, I'm not willing to install this thing on my single XP machine until it's been proven a little more. (Unless there's some easy way to run standalones of IE6 and 7, or perhaps "roll back" to IE6 if 7 is no good?)

[SuzyUK]

>>Unless there's some easy way to run standalones of IE6 and 7, or perhaps "roll back" to IE6 if 7 is no good?

there is Matthew, evolt has the standalone for IE6 which I've been using for a while now.. and I think simply uninstalling IE7 will roll it back to last stable version, though perhaps someone will confirm that

[garyr_h]

Wow, just downloaded and installed. It messed with tons of my settings.. seemed to turn them back to 'default' somehow. Did it for pretty much everything... even my mouse. Weird....

Also, the css is still messed up... weird. I thought they were going to fix it, guess not. *goes back to change the If IE < 6.0 to just If IE*

[JAB Creations]

On the almost done new version of my site I've seen some errors and some new stuff happen.

Because they added support for :hover on all elements and no longer exclusively for anchors my pure CSS drop down menus work and just as good as Firefox! So thats some good news...

When I test layers (with display: none; as default) that have flash objects on them with audio other browsers such as IE6, Firefox, Opera, etc do not request the flash file until the user changes the layer (so the display: none; is removed as an attribute and value) though IE7B2 not only requests the flash object it also executes it (audio cue can be heard). Also some other strange things happening overall though...

I've changed my quirks stylesheet a little bit (lots of stuff removed) but there are still some box model issues.

It's a beta and compared to IE6 it's a step in the right direction I think. The GUI is horrible though! Can someone get Microsoft to comprehend the idea of consistency? It's a big step in the right direction...

[Xuefer]

any idea on how to run it without installtion?
i can run IE7.0B2 by extracting it and put a iexplore.exe.local, but can't with IE7.0B2P, it just start with a window and close immediately

[dsmmg]

>>Unless there's some easy way to run standalones of IE6 and 7, or perhaps "roll back" to IE6 if 7 is no good?
there is Matthew, evolt has the standalone for IE6 which I've been using for a while now.. and I think simply uninstalling IE7 will roll it back to last stable version, though perhaps someone will confirm that

Yea, you can roll back to IE 6 pretty easily. In fact just did it. ;-)

Windows treats the install as an update to XP, so in the add/remove programs dialog box you just need to make sure that the 'Show Updates' checkbox is checked. You'll find the 'Uninstall' under Windows XP, not under IE, however. Uninstall it and you should rollback to IE 6.

So far looks like it worked for me, although you never know...

[jonkemp]

From the IE blog, [blogs.msdn.com...]

Can I run the preview and IE6 at the same time?

No, the preview is a system upgrade that replaces IE6 on your computer with the preview code.

As Chris Wilson pointed out, "'IE' is actually a collection of system components - networking, browser hosting, core HTML rendering, printing, etc. When we install a new version of IE, we're installing it for all applications that use these system components - including the tiny iexplore.exe itself." Because of this, we do not support the various hacks that allow side by side running of IE6 and the IE7 Beta 2 Preview. Running with these could cause issues with the stability of a system.

How do I uninstall the preview?

To uninstall Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview and return to Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP

1. Click “Start,” and then click “Control Panel.”
2. Click “Add or Remove Programs.”
3. Check “Show Updates” at the top of the dialog box.
4. Scroll down the list to “Windows XP – Software Updates,” select “Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2Preview,” and then click "Change/Remove."

If "Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview" does not exist, run %windir%\$NtUninstallie7bet2p$\spuninst\spuninst.exe. You need to have "view hidden folders" enabled. %windir% is your Windows installation directory, which is normally 'C:\Windows' on most systems.

Sucks that you can't run both at the same time. I may unistall it. I need to be able to test IE 6 functionality on web sites and it will be that way for a long time.

Did not fix most IE CSS display problems but already knew that. Looks good but will not replace Firefox for me. Hope they develop it for the Mac.

[tictoc]

Yahoo Alert! Yahoo Mail Beta does not work with the new IE Browser even though it says: it supports..
Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher (for Windows)

Although I am trying to use a beta with a beta. lol. I hope Yahoo corrects this issue soon. I love the new IE so far its awesome!

[tictoc]

one more thing.. why does the IE toolbar have Google already loaded as the default search engine instead of MSN Search? If I were MSN I would make it harder to put Google in that space since Google doesnt have MSN Search on theirs!

Mr Softy is definately back for 2006! This browser is awesome. It has so many things that you have to install as plug-ins on firefox. The new IE even RESTOREs your tabs you had opened in case it locks up!

[edited by: tictoc at 4:10 am (utc) on Feb. 1, 2006]

[Tobasco]

Does anyone know if this installs over and removes IE6? Would like to install it but not if stops me from testing on IE6.
Cheers

[ByronM]

IE 7 installs over ie6.

I like it, the problems i have is i can't get XML/RSS feeds to show up.. seems like a security zone problem but it could also be a problem with NAV/IE 7 integration as well.

Tabbed browsing one upped the others though, the preview, show all and recovery is pretty nice.

[Tobasco]

Having done some research and being a current user of Skzyx's IE 5 and 5.5, I went back to the website, lo and behold he's made a stand alone IE 7 which will run without doing an install! So you get to keep IE6 as your default IE/browser and run IE7 for testing purposes!

[downloads.skyzyx.com...]

[emodo]

Damn... Vista needs to come out so I can check out the "Genuine Advantage". ;-)

[eWhisper]

The tabs aren't nearly as smooth as avant or firefox - which is a shame as thats one of its key features. On many pages, it changes the toolbars around and doesn't keep them consistent (loading a PDF is painful).

However - I wish the 'phishing' script was on by default. I understand its not due to privacy reasons - but I actually started surfing phishing sites today to see how many it caught and brought up huge warnings - and it caught all but one of them.

That's the kind of functionality that it needs to have when rolled out to the masses.

[WebWalla]

Does anybody know if the Google toolbar works with it?

[gph]

Thanks for the link Tobasco.

It "sort of" works on sp1. Two problems:

1/ Clicking the File, Edit etc. menus causes errors

2/ It loads all local files in FF. I suspect if I set IE as default it would load in v6. I don't think I'll experiment with that.

I don't care about the menu errors and it's a bit inconvenient uploading to test but hey, it's usable :)

[Hester]

Having done some research and being a current user of Skzyx's IE 5 and 5.5, I went back to the website, lo and behold he's made a stand alone IE 7 which will run without doing an install! So you get to keep IE6 as your default IE/browser and run IE7 for testing purposes!

That site shows only IE7 Beta 1, not Beta 2.