One reader wrote me recently with a question I couldn’t answer. That question was:
Did you or any readers try IE7 yet? What comments can you post?
I haven’t tried IE7 yet and am not likely to until it gets close to final release — or, more likely, until it is finally released.
Some things I’ve read are good, including a tabbed interface (which I really like in Firefox and Opera). Others, bad — Active-X will still included…
From my point of view, Microsoft will make IE7 comply with some of the CSS 2.0 web design standards, so this is good. But, they’re not going to make it fully compliant with all of CSS 2.0.
That means that web designers will still have to do work-arounds for IE incompatibilities with standards. And, that means IE7 will be less of a pain for me than is IE6, but it will still be a pain.
Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7 has recently been released. It’s available for “open beta testing,” that is, beta 2 is available to anyone who wants to use it. You can get it at
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx
Microsoft has announced that IE7 will be pushed to us as a Critical Update because of the security features built in. Of course, many of those are XP-specific, so they won’t help anyone using Windows 2000.
In my opinion, anyone still using a computer with Windows 98 or Windows ME should check out Xandros 4 Home Edition Premium. it’s a very Windows-like operating system, designed for easy transition from Windows. Without additional security fixes for Win98 and WinMe, those computer users are "rolling loaded dice."
and