[meglamaniac]

I've used IE7 in the labs, but put off using it on my machine at home til it's a bit more mature. Here is my opinion:

I like the UI. I have always hate hate hated that Firefox hides the tab bar by default until you have 2 or more tabs open, without providing a button to open a new tab easily. Sure, there's a keyboard shortcut and you can rightclick links and open them in a new tab etc, but most of Microsoft's customers won't know how or want to have to do that, hence it's a good design choice.

Regarding the aesthetics, they're clearly designed to fit in with Vista not XP. Tough shit. You can't really expect a company not to design a new product to look its best on the latest systems.

The big "tiled thumbnails" view of all open tabs is nifty. I like it.

I like that the menubar can hide to save space.

I like that the search can be altered (the ones in the labs are all set to google anyway).

I like that the browser reset really does reset and is extremely effective at removing spyware toolbars etc.

I don't like that it crashed within 30 minutes of me using it for the first time. However, as with most new software I assume there are bugs to be worked out. Firefox is far from innocent on this front, before you all start.

I've not come across the "back history on the forward button" thing because I've not tried to access it yet, but I'll definately have a look when I'm next in the labs. If that's true it really is a stupid piece of HCI design. If Vista works that way too I'll be concerned to say the least.


Overall it's an improvement over IE6, and quite a substantial one at that.