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Microsoft catches up

by Volker Weber

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 available for download. Read the fine print:

Evaluation of Internet Explorer 7 should start now, but the software should not be used on production systems in mission-critical environments. Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview will only run on Windows® XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) systems, but will ultimately be available for Windows Vista, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, and Windows Server 2003.

What about Windows 2000? Didn't Microsoft want to fix that as well?

I took the tour. What's new? New interface, tabbed browsing, integrated search, RSS feeds, more security. You might as well stay with Firefox then.

Comments

Oh well, no new features – as we have known.

Very recently I have posted (in German) how to use IE7 without installation, in the following the how-to in English:

• download and open the file 'IE7B2P-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe' with a compression tool such as WinRAR and decompress the files to a new folder on your hard disk
• create a new, empty (text)file named 'iexplore.exe.local' in this folder

Now you can launch IE7 by double-clicking 'iexplore.exe'.

Unless they've yanked it in beta 2, the one truly new feature in an earlier IE7 beta which wasn't merely playing catchup with Mozilla/Firefox was checking of AREF URLs etc. to see if they were suspicious. E.g., pointed at known phishing/spam sites, didn't match a displayed URL, were masked in some way, specified an IP address directly, you get the picture. Not perfect, but certainly of some assistance.

Like this Firefox extension?

Too little, too late. I bet the guys and girls churning this stuff out for M$ grimace at the muted reaction to all their hard work...

Death by risk aversion

Let's not forget getinternetexplorer.com. :-)

Oh my gosh, Volker, now I need to link to Spread Internet Explorer
(shame on me, never thought I would link to this particular site)
;-)

I like the overview over the tabs - but that's all I like at IE7.

The recent availability of an anti-phishing Firefox extension from Google raises a number of issues.

1. No one doubts the ability of the community to play catch up. So the availability of a feature in Firefox (though, sadly not in Mozilla) that previously appeared in an IE beta is no way surprising.

2. One of the knocks on the community has been that they it is good at imitation, but not at innovation. The fact that Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird were first with so many features puts pay to this.

3. Finally, why is IE on such a snail-like release schedule? By the time it is actually in user's hands, there will have been several Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird releases. This is the issue that Ray has been railing about.

We just gave it a very quick test ride today. It doesn't render one of our major projects correctly. Yay, more browser-specific problem. So now we're back to finding out if IE7 is right or if IE6, FF, Opera, Safari and Konq are right. :-)

Ceci n'est pas un blog

vowe.net is a personal website published by Volker Weber a.k.a. vowe. I am an author, consultant and systems architect based in Darmstadt, Germany.

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