beta @ amanzi

IE 7 Beta 2 has just been released to the general public as reported on the TechCrunch website. This is now the ‘real’ Beta 2 as opposed to the preview version or the refresh, preview version that was previously available. As is expected, I quickly downloaded the beta and installed it on my primary Windows XP notebook. The installation is nice and pretty with a Vista-like gui as the installer. During the installation you are prompted to download and install and Windows updates, as well as validating your version of Windows XP.

The installation went well and my first impression of the browser was pretty good when it first launched. The interface looks neat and tidy and has nice a gradient over the toolbars. However, I quickly noticed that the browser was quite sluggish – in fact after a second or two it stopped responding. A quick glance at the task manager showed that iexplore.exe was using 99% of the CPU. The problem with running bleeding edge software is that not many other people have posted any issues with it yet so I was stuck figuring it out myself.

The IE developers toolbar was already installed so I managed to disable that from within IE and restarted, but this had no effect – the CPU was still being swamped by the IE process. So I jumped into the control panel, ready to uninstall IE 7 and rollback to IE6, when I saw the developers toolbar listed in the Add/Remove programs applet. I decided to uninstall this first to see if that helped, and hey presto – as soon as this was uninstalled everything was OK again.

So now I’m running the IE 7 Beta 2 and all looks good. My first impression is that while the interface is still a huge leap forward from previous versions, it still leaves something lacking. I don’t like how the Tools and Page menus are buried far to the right and require an extra click to access. I do like how the Go button is the same as the Refresh button, and I also think it’s a good idea to have the separate Stop button too. I don’t like the way feeds are handled – this is definitely a bit too clunky to use as your primary feed reeder application, so I don’t think I’ll be using this feature much.

The most annoying thing that’s happening at the moment is that everytime a page loads, I’m getting an annoying alert noise made in the background. I have no idea what’s causing this or how to stop it! It’s like a little, wooshing, notifcation type sound but I can’t see any visual representation of what it’s trying to get my attention to.

I’ll post more experiences as I browse more…

Links here:

• IE 7 Blog
• TechCrunch posting

UPDATE: Thanks to EricLaw on the IE blog for pointing out that the IE developer toolbar needed to be uninstalled.