All Vista World

Internet Explorer 7

Theres a review of IE7 over at ZDNET.
Over all it seems a big improvement over the sloppy current release and previous incarnations. A lot of this, I put down to the increasing market share of Firefox, my current browser of choice.

Some of the new features include :

Extreme makeover
The toolbar and address bar areas of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows Vista have been totally redesigned. The address bar is now locked at the top of the window so that hijackers can’t replace it with phishing or spyware substitutes. Words have been eliminated in favour of iconic buttons so that only the bare essentials are displayed. In all, it’s a very clean and sophisticated look for an Internet browser.

Zoom, zoom, zoom
As you already can with Opera 8, Microsoft, Internet Explorer 7 for Windows Vista will allow you to zoom in on text and photos within a given Web page. By hitting Ctrl+ or Ctrl-, you can adjust the size of any Web page. This is great for people with disabilities.

Goodbye messy toolbar add-ons
In its desire to eliminate clutter, the new Internet Explorer does away with toolbars for the most popular search engines by integrating search engines from AOL Search, Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo Search directly into the browser. Of course, FireFox already allows you to do so.

Full review here.

Web designers have been cursing microsoft for years, expecially those using css to build sites as all the previous IEs have included a fundamental bug in the way they display css - resulting in a lot of extra hacks being put in the code to cater for ie users. Hopefully this will be fixed in the new version, this may be not be a blessing though as the old versions will still have to be catered for - it could end up being more of a nightmare, we’ll have to wait and see.