Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview was released a couple of days ago. I've been using IE7Beta1 for the last month and it was such a great new that I couldn't help to go to download and install it.

The new user interface is just amazing. Everything has been greatly improved and it's pretty cool. Here is a quick list of the thinks I most like:

• The way that feeds are favorites are organized; but it would be great to include support to synchronize with online services like delicious, newsgator, bloglines, etc...
• The new printing model. It's much better than in other versions
• The complete brand-new way of switching tabs, a new visual way of see a snapshot of every page "a la Windows Vista" that makes it easier to choose your desired tab
• The previous things I disliked in beta1 has been removed or improved:
  • Links in the toolbar have now auto-width instead of fixed width
  • IE warns you if closing a window with more than one tab
• The new menu that provide access to most common used functionality for a Page, Tools, etc..

And there where a couple of bugs I found (and reported) that are working now:

• A page couldn't be saved as an .MHT file with IE 7 Beta1... now it's possible
• Project Server Web wasn't working correctly with IE 7 Beta 1... now it's working

I've been using it for a couple of days. And the new version really engaged me, it was easier to work... look at how it looked:

But, this wasn't as good as expected... It still a beta, and it unstable; very unstable. For example, Outlook Web Access is not working correctly for me as it always giving unexpected errors (mostly when working with popups) that made impossible to write or answer an email. It can be related to all the improvements that have been included in IE7 to make it  more standard-compliant and to the high amount of hacks that developers use to make an application work in different browsers.

You can find a list of Developer and IT checklist that point to the IEBlog where you can see what bugs have been repaired, what standards had been implemented, what hacks had been removed, etc... It's a nice reading.

But what will happen if they don't provide backwards compatibility to currently hacks? Will we have to rewrite our applications? Hmmm, this could be an interesting point, because most of the applications I've tested have failed. Even the .Text administration page was failing, so it was impossible to write anything from my laptop.

Well, my final decision was to remove Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview from my laptop and reinstall the Beta1 that worked better for my daily work with Internet Explorer (mails, blogs, report) and wait for the final version or a new beta. This has been the fastest rises and fall of an empire in my laptop computer :-D

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