IE7 is now available for download. I did this last night and I find the browser to be a big improvement over IE6, but it is not big enough to get me to leave Firefox.
Here are some of the things that I feel are good improvements:
Search: IE7 has added a search box in the top right corner. During the install process there is a single settings page. This page correctly identified my previous default search provider as Google. It allowed me to keep this. IE7 also allows you to add other search providers. They have a good selection of 30 and provide a relatively simple method for adding a site that is not included on the list.
Tabs: The tabs are very slick looking. Two management options are built in. One is a dropdown list of your currently opened tabs. The other is a page showing screenshots of all of the tabs. There are no settings (that i could find) in the menus to set tabbing preferences, but at least when I attempted to close the browser it sked me if I wished to re-open them again.
RSS: It identified the feeds on my page.
Add-ons: In the menu options, there is a link to an IE Add-ons site. This site is full of free and pay plugins — most notably in my mind the Google toolbar was among them.
UI: The top of the browser is shorter, leaving more vertical room for web browsing.
Here are some of the things that I feel miss the mark:
UI: The buttons, though very pretty are scattered. The Back and Forth buttons are to the left of the browser, but the Stop and Refresh are on the right. Annoying.
Tabs: I want more advanced functionality than what is provided in the single pop-up box. Give me tab settings to manipulate and tweak to my liking.
Add-ons: There were a bunch of them, but I don’t see many sexy ones.
It will be interesting to watch how this affects IE’s market share. Radar currently gets 48% of its traffic from Firefox, 38% of its traffic from IE variants, 8% from Safari, and a number of other browser bring in the rest. Of the 38%, IE7 has 7%, which means it is at 2.7% of our traffic. Firefox 2.0 has 8% of the FF share for 3.8% of our traffic. We attract hardcore geeks (yes, you :-) and it will be interesting to see how these numbers change over the next couple of months. I think that on this site we will see an increase in IE7, but an overall dip in IE once FF 2.0 comes out.
Mary Jo Foley has the full rollout schedule and tips for people who don’t want to install IE7.