Review: Internet Explorer 7 has no soul

Computerworld - It's one thing to list the features of a new product. It's quite another to actually live with it, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.

The fact that I first installed Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 for Windows XP on April 20 means I haven't even had two weeks with the browser yet. That's not enough time with a product of this importance and complexity to form a final conclusion. And yet, if there's nothing I've learned about reviewing software and hardware over the last 20 years, it's that if I don't become intrigued when first trying out a product's new features -- before I've come across all its warts -- I'm unlikely to be an actual user when all is said and done.

I'm definitely not excited. The sum of IE7's parts isn't greater than the whole. There's no there in there. It lacks soul. Although the IE development team has done a commendable job of grafting Microsoft renditions of some worthy Firefox and Opera features onto IE6, as well as heavily revamping security, the forthcoming version of the Web browser doesn't break significant new ground.

Is it better than IE6? Yes. I can't think of even a small way that Microsoft has taken its browser package in the wrong direction. What's more, were I to go over IE7 feature by feature, I would point out -- as I've done with earlier prerelease builds of IE7 -- several nicely crafted features and well-designed functionalities (see "Microsoft offers free tech support with Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2"). On the other hand, saying it's better than IE6 isn't saying much.

If you're eager to try IE7 Beta 2 for yourself, my advice is not to install it on your everyday machine. It does uninstall, though. Please remove any previous version of IE7 before you install this one. You can find out more about, and download IE7 Beta 2, on Microsoft's Internet Explorer page.

The very first day I installed IE7 Beta 2 I got into the classic endless loop that the XP Service Pack 2 version of IE6 was famous for. I was attempting to use the main control panel supplied by one of my Web hosts. IE7 kept blocking an applet page from opening. The yellow info bar opened across the top of the browser window, asking whether I wanted to block the window or script from running. (I'm not even sure what kind of process the Web-host control panel runs.) When, in the info bar, I allowed the page to launch, the page process had terminated because of IE7's interruption. When I refreshed the page to run the process again, bang -- IE7 blocked it again. Endless loop. This doesn't happen often, but even one time is far too many.