It’s out. It’s the first major new version of Internet Explorer that has been made publicly available in 4 1/2 years, and, if I’m not mistaken, the first publicly available beta version since IE4 Platform Preview in the late nineties.
I haven’t yet had chance to install it but I intend to on my laptop to give it a spin. As a web designer, I hope that it’ll make my life easier by having better standards support and more consistent rendering with Safari, Firefox and Opera – it’ll save me and people like Dave a lot of time and sanity.
Make sure you also install the Microsoft Beta Client Tool for reporting bugs, and be aware that as Internet Explorer is an integral part of Windows, and that this is a beta version that hasn’t been fully tested, it may totally break your computer. You should have thorough backups of everything first.
Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2
January 31, 2006
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February 1, 2006 at 01:26
I’m getting a bad page layout of your site using IE 7.
The “What’s This?” list seems to have moved to the left.
February 1, 2006 at 08:13
I recall trying IE6 beta way back when, so it must have been a public release as well. I also vividly remember having to format and reinstall Windows 98 afterwards since it kept crashing
. I’m also fairly certain there was a public beta for IE5 as well, can’t say about 5.5.
February 1, 2006 at 10:17
By the sound of a comment on my blog, it still doesn’t support max-width:
http://davidnaylor.org/blog/2006/01/ie7-beta-2-preview-released.html