I installed the IE7 Beta today and so far it’s kind of a disappointment. The addition of tabbed browsing is a nice, if very late, addition. It looks pretty clean and seems to load quickly. The PNG alpha layer support is great but not anything revolutionary.

One MAJOR complaint is that it breaks Trillian. If you use Trillian you have to uninstall the MSN plug-in which is unfortunate. Hopefully the Trillian devs will release a fix.

Now for the important stuff – CSS. Basically, I’ll give Microsoft a D- here. MezzoBlue has an excellent write up of everything that’s wrong, which is far better than anything I could put together here. The quick version is that Microsoft really dropped the ball and most of the CSS bugs from IE6 are still in IE7. It’s a shame because the IE Team really had a chance to step up and make IE a contender. I was totally ready to fall back in love with IE, but alas, it is not to be. It follows Microsoft’s recent pattern of creating programs that simply try to catch up to competitors without doing anything innovative.

I tested out some Flex apps (this is with the Flash Player 8 beta) and it looks like it runs about the same memory-wise as IE6 does. The initialization seems a scosh faster but the difference is negligible. I’ll be doing some more tests next week.

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