Now that IE7 is in public beta, I decided to pull it down and give it a try.

In summary: Very impressed! But there are a few minor things I'd like to see before the final release.

There are plenty of in-depth reviews (I liked this one) of IE7 out there, so I won't bore you with details. I'll just mention a few things I liked and disliked.

  • The new "Favorites Center" (or Favourites Centre if you can spell. Heh.) is quite nifty. It lets you navigate and organise your favourites, RSS subscriptions and history in one drop-down panel. However, I haven't yet discovered how to get to it using the keyboard. I always use Alt+A to get to my favourites, and Alt+A in IE7 still uses the traditional menu bar (which auto hides now)
  • RSS subscriptions are very nicely done, but I can't see myself using IE7 as a feed reader - there just doesn't seem to be any benefit over actually visiting the original blogs and pages. Having said that, the way IE7 provides a universal store for RSS subscriptions means that 3rd-party feed aggregators can use it - so IE7 becomes your one-stop-shop for subscribing to feeds (if not reading them).
  • Tabbed browsing rocks, and I'm fast getting used to Ctrl+Clicking to open a page in a new tab. The way you can preview all the tabs as thumbnails is very cool, too. One thing I'd love: The ability to tell IE to open any new shortcut in a new tab. So if I have a page open, and I click Start|Run and run a URL, that URL should open in the same IE window but a new tab. Currently the only option is to open it either in the same window and tab, or in a completely new window.
  • Still can't switch between alternate stylesheets like I can in Mozilla, but then I suppose so few page support alternate styles that it's not a big issue.
  • A couple of times IE stole my focus. That's really annoying. I hope they can do something about that.

Have you tried IE7 yet? What are your thoughts?