Girl Geekette

As MS has released a new Beta 2 of IE 7.0 , a lot of questions have been asked. Is it better? Will it be worth the upgrade? What’s new in it? Well.. as of now, like many suspect it is still pretty slow and buggy. As touted by MS it does have a lot of fixes in it. I am extremely happy to see tabbed browsing (multiple sessions in one window like FireFox, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape and the like are capable of now). That is a definite improvement! Nothing like having one browser window open with 10 tabs in it instead of 10 separate windows to clutter your start bar! For a while, that got so handy in Firefox and the like I refused to run IE just because of that!

Other fixes, additions and release notes can be found on the MSDN site. Unfortunately, as of right now, Microsoft claims "This release is only for Windows XP Service Pack 2 for x86 processors as detailed on the Beta 2 Direct Page. Other versions of Windows are not supported for this preview. We expect to offer IE7 for x64 and Windows 2003 Server SP1 in a future preview." Although, I have found a work around for this and I will post it in another article. Although MS does NOT support this setup, so if you run them side, please do not report any bugs to Microsoft.

For those who would like to download IE 7.0 beta2, the download can be found on the MS Site for Beta 2 of IE 7.0.