Well, Internet Explorer 7 is making its way out to general public [Beta 2 Preview available for download].

As far as I see, after watching their tour, they “improved” the interface. In my humble opinion it is much cluttered…

More than that, dispite the look and feel of this new version of IE, MSFT developers “borrowed” a lot of things from Firefox and Opera: tabbed browsing, improved search options and RSS feeds.

But… what’s new? Is the IE7’s engine better, faster? Did MSFT developers fixed the horror of box model and other issues made us developers to pervert the W3C standards by inventing hacks and workarounds?

I have found a list with what’s new in MSFT IE7. These points draws my attention:

• CSS Improvements -many of the major inconsistencies had been fixed
• Alpha Channel in PNG - now we can use PNG transparency!!! [ it is really ridiculous we can’t with previous version of IE! - there were workarounds, but we do not need them ]
• Phishing Filter - now this is a new thing!
• Page Zoom - for both text and graphics [now this is very interesting!]
• Improved AJAX Support - “Internet Explorer 7 exposes XMLHTTP natively”

There are interesting features thought in the new IE 7. I will test itm much closely, in a few days. I hope IE7 will make our life, developers life, much easier. Of course, IE7 will be widely installed after 2-3 years from now. We will have this time to find new bugs and workarounds…

Further reading:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie/infoindex/default.aspx