I took the plunge and installed IE7 after it was released yesterday, safe in the knowledge that, with various bugs being reported already, there is always Firefox. (Check out http://www.ie7.com/!) Initial thoughts are pretty positive but I’m not ready to switch yet (at least until I see what Firefox 2.0 has to offer).
As expected, there is tabbed browsing but with the addition of a nice “Quick Tabs” button which gives you a pictorial overview of the contents of all of the open tabs. There is also the ability to read RSS feeds. One feature here which I’ve yet to find in other readers is that, for a particular feed, it shows the categories of the current posts and allows you to filter by category.
Next along the icon bar is the print button. IE now automatically resizes the text to fit the content across the page. Also good to see is a button to remove those pesky headers and footers, along with the ability to resize margins graphically.
The “Tools” menu reveals the built-in pop-up blocker and phishing filter. This is followed by an interesting “Research” button which allows searching across a number of resources such as Encarta, a thesaurus and translation sites. The cynic in me suspects that this is Microsoft’s attempt to sideline Wikipedia. For a couple of my regular readers, it’s worth noting that the translation includes English-Swedish and English-Russian. At least the update remembered that Google should be my default search engine.