I installed and played with the new IE7 beta 2 and I was impressed by some features they were able to copy from Firefox and Opera but I was turned off once I noticed how it broke a lot of my existing software. Basically, Nero and Yahoo Messenger became unstable during the install of IE7. If you use your computer with these programs on a regular basis, I would avoid the new IE7 beta.
I was eager to see how they would handle RSS feeds. To my surprise, they did not over-haul the method in which favorites are stored. They are still saved in files with a .url extension. More disappointing is the RSS feeds are not integrated into the favorites. I know why they separated the RSS feeds from the Favorites – the RSS feeds need to be cached and refreshed every so often, which would bring up a problem storing the cached information in the Favorites folder. I was expecting them to create windows folders and dynamically populating each RSS folder with feed information but my assumption was wrong. Sadly the Favorites not keeping odd characters found in the web site bug titles remains.
IE 7 Lacking in Style
There are many style sheet (CSS) problems with Internet Explorer. I was rather disappointed to see they really did not fix any of them. In particular, they do not respect the transparent color property. This drives me nuts. Microsoft claims that adding the support for transparency would break existing designs specific for Internet Explorer. I think the opposite, many of us web developers have to avoid doing some really cool things with the style sheets simply because IE doesn’t recognize the styles. What a pain!
