Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview Is Now Avaliable For Download

[george]

Internet Explorer 7: BETA 2 Preview is now avaliable for download:

IE7 BETA 2 Preview download (Size 11.3 MB)

I've been using it for half an hour or so now and I must say I am very impressed thus far. It is a major improvement in terms of GUI and features. We'll see how much it's improved parser wise when we check to make sure our websites work with it.

An alternative to Firefox!

Please note that you need an original Windows XP to run this BETA, as it will validate your copy of Windows when installing, so you better not running a Panthip version.

[Florin]

It's a pretty cool piece of software, but it does have some incompatibilities with certain websites...as for the validation check, there have always been ways around it

[FlyingDutchman]

I'm sorry to say, but for something "important", like an internet-browser (I hàve to use) I always wait when the finished user version arrives. I hate it to see the bugs. Maybe because I am into software development and I need to get bugs out of my own system. Gettin' bugged by others, might be a little tòò much .

[Maestro]

Internet Explorer 7: BETA 2 Preview is now avaliable for download:

Too bad that it still won’t be W3C compliant with regard to cascading style sheets (CSS); I quote below from a Microsoft Watch site:

But there's one area where Microsoft won't be winning a lot of applause.

The company will continue to drag its feet by refusing to provide full support for the CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets Level 2) W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) standard, Microsoft partners say.

Sources claiming familiarity with Microsoft's IE 7.0 plans said the company will add some additional CSS2 support to its new standalone browser.

But Microsoft isn't planning to go the whole way and make IE 7.0 fully CSS2 compliant, sources said.

Apparently, IE7 cannot handle web sites designed to display CSS correctly in earlier IE versions and Microsoft is asking web designers to change the code of those sites. However, this lack of backward compatibility will mean that once those sites using CSS display correctly in IE7, they won’t display correctly anymore in IE6 and earlier versions.

There is some discussion of this in this blog.

I don’t know how true this is and wonder if any web designer in this forum is already beta testing IE7 and can comment on it.

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Maestro

[dantilley]

Not beta testing IE7 yet, Maestro, but that sounds like a nightmare - yet ANOTHER browser derivation we have to compensate for and code for! So the list of differing browser specs we could now have to make sites work under includes:

IE 5

IE 5.5

IE 6

IE 5.2 on Mac

IE 7

Firefox

Netscape 6.2

Netscape 7

Opera

Safari

Firefox on Mac

AOL browser

Admitedly some of those are pretty similar but for any major site there will always be anomalies...

Edited February 1, 2006 by dantilley

[dantilley]

Also, does it replace your IE6 if you install this Beta version? Or can you have the two running simultaneously?

[Florin]

You can run them simultaneously if you back up your IE6 folder, the default one will become IE7, but you can just make a shortcut and run IE6 manually.

[dantilley]

Ah, yeah I do that with IE 5 and IE 5.5, but it buggers those versions up somewhat, so I'm a bit dubious.

[Maestro]

yet ANOTHER browser derivation we have to compensate for and code for!

Would it be malevolent of me to think that Microsoft has always had a purpose in refusing to strictly follow the HTML standard? They fear they would lose market share in the browser field.

I wonder if the non-standard variations of IE are really that important, if web designers could not do without them. The heart of the problem, I guess, is that most of the software being sold to make web design easier inserts those non-standard features into the code, yet it would be so easy to verify the code for W3C compliance at http://validator.w3.org/

(Verification of the page you’re looking at reports 79 errors, all harmless enough to cause no problem in IE and Firefox, but I have seen pages of some other web sites that have a real problem already before the advent of IE7)

-------------------

Maestro

[dantilley]

A lot of the IE CSS problems are down to Microsoft imposing their own extra little features and formats that they think should work better - thinks like extra margins and padding being put in by default, other layout things which, I suspect, may have something to do with making IE-viewed web pages compatible with MS Office products, or perhaps done deliberately to try and drive people away from competing browsers, as you suggest. (The industry's been full of these dirty tricks for a long time: as an aside, I remember back in the day when Amstrad computers were the only model of computer that used 3 inch floppy discs, to try and corner a niche market.)

These "helpful" extras put in by Microsoft can make WC3 compliant pages look a right mess. There are one or two useful IE-specific things, for example you can ad styles to a scrollbar in IE to make it any colour you want, but in most cases it's just a pain in the arse.

Edited February 1, 2006 by dantilley

[cnnaing]

Microsoft developed IE 7 for Windows Vista. So if you want to use it, install Windows Vista first.

[george]

Where do I get the latest Vista ALFA or BETA version. I want to have it as my secondary boot-up.

[dantilley]

Where do I get the latest Visa BETA?

Pantip???

[cnnaing]

pantip!!, yes. Sure. if you want to go there, here :Vista 2006

[Artisan]

pantip!!, yes. Sure. if you want to go there, here :Vista 2006

Don't bother. I tried this and got the headline "Find a Real SEX Partner in Thailand now!"

The other links with the site "Satanwarez.com" are to shopping websites!

[John_Betong]

You can run them simultaneously if you back up your IE6 folder, the default one will become IE7, but you can just make a shortcut and run IE6 manually.

Hi,

I just came across this technique for installing IE7 without having the setup overwrite/update your old IE6.

1. Download and save the beta EXE but don't run it. It's a self-extracting, self-installing ZIP file; we want to do this manually.

2. Create a new folder called 'IE7'.

3. Right-click on the EXE and scroll down to 'Extract to...' for Winzip. If you don't use Winzip, this process should work in your decompression software of choice.

4. Extract everything to your 'IE7' folder, making sure you keep the folder structure intact by keeping 'Use folder names' checked.

5. Open your 'IE7' folder, right-click inside the folder and scroll to 'New/Text Document.

Create a new txt file called 'iexplore.exe.local'. Make sure you're changing the file's format, not just renaming your text document to 'iexplore.exe.local.txt'.

That's it. Run 'iexplore.exe' in that folder -- do not run 'iesetup.exe', which will initiate the full install.

( I created a link to my desktop).

Note that Microsoft says it won't provide support for this kind of setup, so if you think you may want help, this option probably isn't for you.

Cheers,

PS It works "on my computer"