Nice one …
The very first feeling – i have seen so many things somewhere else … where ? … OsX … again ?
Yeeees (with the intonation of Morpheus).
Interface has been twicked very nicely, thought the very first thought of mine was actually – is it IE 3 or IE 7, the icon should be undone, redone and so on. Oh, i know about that this icon make a part of the “new” aqua “air” interface, but at least on 2 different computers it does not look so fine. The “clear type” fonts are impressive – very nice antialliasing, Quick tabs – copright Apple Microsoft, Zooming feature – fantastic( thanks, Opera Microsoft ), but the most important feature of them all is a tendency (first step), into the direction of the good css support. The one, that the most webdesigners were asking, crying, calling, emailing, spamming, begging on their knees for the last 5(five) years. God wishes, we will have some more real websites by the end of 2006-2007, if iE7 will appear this year alongside with Vista, of course. =O) The search toolbar is where it should be – with msn search as a default option, add-on manager is a very nice and hopefully usefull functional option – you can see all(?) the activeX “stuff” installed on your computer, addons that “run without requiring permission”, currently loaded and currently used add-ons.
Usability – the reload and stop icons have been moved to a very strange position. From one side, its nice to have them separated from the rest of the functionality, but from the other side, you have to get used to their new place, and they are way too small, to be noticed instantly, and even after noticing, the people outside of the computer industry will have some problem understanding their functionality, judging only by the icons.
About CSS – some of the things i did with the hacks, are obviously broken, there is no big surprise here, but its nice to see some real css changes in microsoft policies.( I _hope_ they will get the stuff right, before the final release ) And as one of my friends is going to start working at microsoft – i have to be more careful, when writing about them. I will have a pleasure fixing these little things when i see the final product, but not before i will see it on my computer (promise != final_product && hope(7.0b < 7.0) ) On IE7 beta 2, this blog (which design is still very far away from my wishes) has some minor glitches, and i am going to twick them as soon as the final release going to appear. =O) I see this effort as a very good and important movement of recognizing the importance of the web design. Lately, microsoft were "feeding" us with the new versions of development tools, but only last year i have finally heard the announcements of the new products dedicated web design. As at this moment the vast majority of the population is using IE, all of us depending on its progress.
In the next few days i am going to do more IE testing, as i am very excited about the progress, that the biggest share browser is going make.