The Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview (why preview a beta? why not just say it’s an alpha?) is aimed at developers – the actual download page only has checklists for Developers and IT Pros, and a post on the IEblog say flat out that they are “looking forward to feedback that will help us deliver a great, consumer-focused beta.” The browser has been updated with tab support, an anti-fishing filter, built in RSS support, etc, and a somewhat… unique GUI layout. So if you’re running Windows XP Service Pack 2 and are curious to try it out, there are two installation options.

Picking an Installation Method

If you use Internet Explorer as your default browser you probably don’t want to install this beta preview as you’ll find some sites will break. You can head to our running multiple browsers on a workstation article to download a standalone (unsupported) version of IE7.

If Internet Explorer isn’t your main browser you’ll get better behaviour if you actually install the program as it does replace some system .dll files. You can still install a stand-alone version of IE 6 for testing purposes from running multiple browsers on a workstation.

Coding Concerns

Given the years Internet Explorer was a dead application the development team seems to have set some really pragmatic goals as well as a more open community minded focus. One of the biggest fears is that IE7 will have partial fixes that will just end up bloating CSS code as IE6 will not be going away anytime soon. Taking out the * hack in strict mode is fine and dandy – as long as they fix the misbehaviour that made the hack necessary in the first place. The Web Standards Project has an extremely illuminating post summarizing positions on the *html hack by those that will have a hand in its implementation.

A few issues have already popped up in the beta, odd behaviour with :focus and :hover and padding correctly no longer affecting the width of absolutely positioned elements but still doing so to relatively positioned ones. More alarming is the fact that height now correctly works – but min-height, max-height, min-width, and max-width are still not supported (but surely if they have CSS3 selectors working as of now this will appear in the final product). So no more easy pseudo min-height. I’ve noticed something related to nesting absolutely positioned elements that breaks in IE7… though the page renders in IE 5, IE5.5, and IE6 as well as every modern browser I’ve tried.

The good news is the purpose of this preview release was to catch bugs like these. They’ve outlined where things stand CSS wise with this release, and are actively listening to the design community. The more feedback they get the less of a headache we’ll have once IE7 final is shipped to the world – they’ve already fixed support for !important. An MSDN article on CSS compatibility in Internet Explorer 7 is up too.