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IE7Posted by Andrew Poelstra on April 26, 2006.

Because of traumatizing experiences with the second beta, I refuse to try the third. Also, I don't use Windows ever anymore (the final switch was media center, which we fixed with MythTV a few weeks ago). Here's my review for the second beta: Posted by Andrew P February 15th, 2006 at 1:47

This browser sucks! As I was typing in this comment, the textbox is jumping around (might be a feature of the site, but it's also moving the text I'm typuing, so that I have to close my eyes to avoid screwing hem up. And, the 'end' key's behavior is volatile due to this, and it keeps resetting to the top of the text, so I couldn't see what I'm typing if I tried to. Auggh! I agree with the guy who hates anti-aliasing; I have a great LCD and this still is overbearing. Plus the stupid display bugs, the lack of proper CSS support, and the screwed up UI. Who the hell wants the menus to be hidden by default?? If you care, you can disable the anti-aliasing:
Press 'alt' to get your menus back. They'll be in the wrong place, but the whole thing is so horribly implemented that it won't matter. If you press anything else the menu will vanish, so don't try to keep typing.

Click 'Tools', 'Internet Options' and then click 'Advanced'.

Under 'multimedia' (the perfect noun to describe plain text), there is a tiny, varely visible option called 'Cleartype'

I assume you have to restart IE; I'm not even going to try those steps, lest it erase this post again.
Note: If you bump the keyboard, it will take you back and erase anything you'd typed into forms (yes, I bumped the left arrow while holding alt for the tutorial above, but even so). Also, the pages load slower than Firefox still; they haven't fixed the bug wherein IE wouldn't regognize a proxy if it bit it in the ass. The tabbed browsing implementation is crap; There's a blank tab that actually means 'new tab', the X is only visible on the tab that is active (which means that you have to click twice to kill an unwanted tab), and there's a delay of half a second before it loads a freaking blank tab. None of the button icons make sense except for the RSS one, which they admitted to sharing with Firefox. I got a popup from Google asking me to switch from MSN search; had to run an EXE to install it. So much for security. Finally, the icons on the so-called "streamlined" display look like crap. The back and forward buttons are jagged and aliased, even thought the text isn't (which I want to have defined edges so that I can read it). How this is called a beta, let alone a second beta, is beyond me. Pretty sad, considering that I've said that of all MS's browsers (this one is supposed to be different). I'm STILL waiting for IE6 to come out of beta, which I figured it never would, after 5 years of inactivity. How crap like this ever made it into production code, I'll never know.

I also added this a few days later:

Acid2 compliance has not changed at all. Still all bloody red.

Google gives me popups even after I installed their search engine extension garbage (which was an EXE, of all things).

I mentioned that this is not beta; after ten minutes of playing with it, I can assure you that this is not even worthy to be an Alpha. I've used Firefox releases that were just nightly builds, less than alphas, that worked far, far better than this.