IE7 Beta Available

Posted on January 31, 2006

It’s been in a restricted-access beta for a couple of months now, but today Microsoft opened the gates (sorry) and announced that Internet Explorer 7 is now available as a public beta for any interested parties to download.

Begun, this browser war has…

UPDATE (Feb. 1, 2006): Wow. Um, OK. So it turns out they have completely ditched the standard Windows human interface rules:

Click image for full-size version

Note the complete absence of a menu bar, and the migration of the taskbar icons to the right of the (new) tab strip.

I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised, given how MS has already thrown out the Windows UI in Office, but it’s still a little disorienting to see a Microsoft application with an out-of-left-field UI.