A quick review (just the facts ma’am)

You can see whats new with a visual tour at microsoft.com before/after which you can download it

First impressions:

  1. It’s 11MB in size
  2. It wants to ‘validate’ your copy of windows to check it isn’t pirated.
  3. It wants to download and run various ‘fixes’ to IE prior to installation, and run the ‘Microsoft malicious software removal tool’
  4. Takes a while to install, several minutes, and of course…. requires a reboot!
  5. It has a web developer tool bar you can download (check the IE7.0 blog), very similar to the Firefox equiv
  6. The ‘quick tabs’ feature is kinda neat, like the effect you get in OS X with you hit F9.
  7. I fee it’s RSS integration is heaps better than firefox’s.
  8. The rest of the layout is … odd… they’ve obviously tried to be different and I’m not sure it works.. it *is* different, but I don’t think it necessarily better.
    1. They’ve copied the Windows Media Player 10 thing - no menu bar, just icons that have drop downs, which I find confusing.
    2. They’ve moved stop away from back and forward and all the buttons are much smaller, this gives more browsing space, but makes me have to think when I go looking to mash a button.
    3. The whole thing looks ‘not right’, kinda like Opera :) 
    <li>I applaud their efforts at anti-phishing, they are really trying with this and I wish them the best.</li>

In summary, its interesting, but I’ll stick with firefox in the mean time.