25 March 2006

I love a new idea, product or version of a product that makes life easier for everyone. So it is no wonder I am constantly on the lookout for the latest and greatest in browser technology.

I am staying away from Netscape for now, but use IE6 and Firefox interchangeably. IE is the standby that never fails, while Firefox offers the cool features and has awesome extensions to personalize and maximize the performance.

But the other day (3/20/06) IE7 Beta 2 was made available and I have been trying it out to see what I think. So far I love it! Reminds me a lot of Firefox with integrated RSS feed management and tabbed browsing. I like the new minimalist approach to the toolbars and the floating favorites menu that can either fly out or be pinned to the sidebar. Also, check out the zoom feature to see the small stuff!

Of course there are drawbacks to any Beta version (I purposefully did NOT try Beta 1 to avoid the initial bugs). Already I see some issues with flash objects (requires you to click on them initially to make them active) but I haven't had it long enough to give a full list of my likes/dislikes. The thing I'm really looking forward to is whether or not microsoft is going to play nice and work toward standardization for cascading style sheet (css) support...

Hopefully after a bit more work, they will release IE7 and the world will be a better place for all of us!