The new beta release for Explorer 7 is available now. I downloaded it, and my early impressions are generally good.
The interface is dramatically better than past generations. The toolbars take up far less room on the screen than before, and are well laid out, though the change may take a little getting used to for some. There are some handy-dandy new features, some of which may actually be useful in real life.
First off is tabbed browsing. A browser without it isn’t even really a browser at all, so they finally decided to catch up there.
There is also a neat littler button that opens thumbnails of all open tabs in one view. This is neat, but in reality will probably not be very useful.
There is a button that makes the browser panel full-screen, and hides the toolbar. This is also neat, and allows one to see a huge amount of a web page, but it also hides the windows taskbar, making it impossible to see other open applications. This would only be useful if you were using the internet but not other applications at the same time.
There are a ton of other little do-dads, but what I was really interested in was the support for standards.
It seems that they have added support for the position:fixed style. This has long been lacking, and will open up design for many sites. For me personally, it impacts the game I am writing.
On the site for explorer, they claim to honor the :hover pseudo class for all elements. My testing has not shown this to be true as yet.
One thing I do know about it is that it makes this site all screwed up. This may also be true in the current version of explorer, and is really my fault. I am doing some stupid stuff to make my links look the way I want, and should probably just cut it out.
The text rendering seems just outstanding, and even better than Firefox. Hell, the text in Explorer looks better than the text in Word, at least the old version I’m using. Really nice.
I think that this update brings Explorer up to the level of Firefox, and in some areas beyond, but I am still not going to switch for general use. Why, you ask? It too Microsoft about four years to come up with this update, and it just now reaches the standards of css1. This is years too late. Firefox, though it may be behind for the time being, will continue to grow and change. It will soon outpace Explorer once again, and all will be right with the world.