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As you may have heard, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 to the public today. Being the carefree early adopter that I am, I threw caution to the wind and installed this new browser on my work laptop. Did I make a mistake? Let’s find out…

I first saw IE7 at Gnomedex last summer when the development team gave the first public demo. It really has changed since this demo and I have to say that this is a pretty thorough beta that Microsoft has released. Is it ready for primetime? Maybe not. Is it ready for those willing to experiment? After a couple hours of experimenting I’d say, “probably”.

This browser has a lot of nice features built right into the code and you can tell that the development team had used Firefox before. :) Tabbed browsing? Check! Built-in pop-up blocker? Si! Integrated search box? Yup! A cool feature like Foxpose that allows me to see all of my tabs at once? Hell yeah! The most beautiful rendering of text I’ve ever seen in Windows? (gulp) yes!? (did I just say that out loud?) :)

The rendering of pages is quick and I didn’t hit any weird compatibility issues with any sites I visited. As I mentioned above, I have to admit that the text on pages look beautiful. Even boring pages (like the one you’re reading) look amazing due to the text rendering.

So what else is exciting in IE7? I definitely think the “biggest” thing has to be the support of RSS within the browser. I think that this is finally going to be what drives the popularity of RSS feeds to the general public. Podcasts didn’t really take off until iTunes had built-in support. I think IE7 is going to drive the usefulness of RSS home to your non-geeky friends and family. When you hit a site that has one or more RSS (or other flavors of feeds), the Feed Icon () that appears in the top menu bar lights up. You click the icon and you get a nicely formatted version of the feed that asks if you’d like to subscribe.

Much nicer than a user not familiar with RSS looking at a page full of XML and wondering why the hell this person has a link to it on their site. If the user subscribes, they get a nicely formatted version of their feeds with some cool features available such as instant filtering and categorization of the posts. Very cool.

All in all, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 release. Will it replace my use of Firefox? Not yet. I always have both IE and Firefox open on my Windows machine due to testing of sites (and Outlook Web Access is much nicer in IE). I do know that it’s a much nicer browser than what I was used to within IE. I think all of the built-in features and other things that are to come, it’s very promising. Let’s just hope it’s as secure as it is pretty.