You have to look pretty closely to see the cosmetic differences: Icons for the Favorites Center have changed a bit since February, and the choices on the Tools menu have been rearranged slightly, but otherwise, virtually all the changes are under the hood. The official Beta 2 release incorporates bug fixes and changes to the underlying rendering engine that developers should appreciate, and the whole thing should now be stable enough for anyone to use or test.
How does the latest release of IE measure up to the latest from Firefox? For the answers, I compared IE7 Beta 2 on Windows XP against the most recent general release of Firefox, version 1.5.0.2.
Which browser handles the basics better?
The clean and spare IE7 interface is essentially unchanged from the Beta 2 preview release I looked at in February. By efficiently mixing buttons and menus in a single command bar that shares a row with the tab bar, IE7's page layout provides a bit more room than IE6 or Firefox for viewing the contents of the current page. The traditional top-level menu is hidden in a default installation (it reappears temporarily with a tap of the Alt key). The standard toolbar vanishes too, shrinking to a much smaller and more compact set of buttons.
  Click image to enlarge and to launch image gallery. |
The new Favorites Center in IE7 combines the Favorites menu and the Explorer Bar in a single drop-down list that can be pinned to the left side of the browser window. Printing is smarter, shrinking pages to fit on a single sheet of paper and offering a useful preview. One especially innovative feature in IE7 is the new Zoom button in the lower-right corner of the browser window. Clicking the button zooms the entire page -- graphics and text -- from 100% to 125% and then 150%; or use the slider to pick custom zoom levels up to 10 times the original page size.
Despite the significant interface changes, this version of IE feels familiar, and it's easy to accomplish common tasks. All in all, it's a cleaner look than Firefox and easier to navigate for everyday tasks, but the difference is hardly enough to make it worth switching.
Advantage (a slim one): IE7
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