It's All In The Tabs
Beta 1 of Internet Explorer 7 has a simple, even unfinished look. It comes with five toolbars: the tabbed-browsing bar, address bar, the file-menu bar, the button-function bar (the only true "toolbar"), and the Links bar (which is turned off by default).
Beta 1 has a very clean, simple interface that actually looks a bit unfinished.
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The tabbed-browsing bar is the single most important feature in IE 7.0. We suspect that, even after the other 75 percent of new features are added in the final version of this product, this statement will continue to be true. When you launch the browser, it displays one wide browser tab containing your home page, with a small dark gray button to the right of the tab. To add a new tab, you click the dark gray button, which always appears just to the right of the right-most tab. This works quite well, but isn't obvious to new users. Microsoft will almost certainly be building user-interface refinements to this basic functionality. As you add new tab windows, the width of all the tabs compresses, working something like the program buttons on the Windows Taskbar.
In Beta 1, right-clicking the dark gray button has no effect. But you can right-click any tab button or any empty space on the tab bar to bring up a context menu with New Tab, Refresh, Refresh All, Close Other Tabs, and Close options. Sorely missing is a simple way to close tabs without using a context menu or rearrange the tabs. Several Firefox extensions offer functionality that IE7 should adopt, including keyboard-mouse combinations for closing tabs (such as Ctrl-Click), the ability to rearrange the order of tabs by dragging and dropping, and the ability to save tab sets and reopen them later.
the small dark gray box to the right of the tabs opens a new blank tabbed page when clicked.
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