The IE7 Beta 2 preview shown at MIX06 solved some major CSS rendering errors that occured in the first Beta 2 preview. A slightly updated version of that build is now public, and is referred to as Beta 2 Preview released on March 20, build 5335.5, or Beta 2 Preview refresh, or finally ie7b2pmx. This release is being labeled as ‘‘layout complete’ so… this Beta 2 Preview is at release candidate status? In any case testing its behaviour is a more practical endeavor than one driven by curiousity. This is still only a Windows XP SP2 release, though a Server 2003 edition will eventually be available as well.

This refresh now supports min/max height and width as well as more CSS selectors and many noticable real world rendering bugs have been fixed. Given the short time span since the last release this is pretty impressive and welcome progress. The IEBlog post about this release has more information, and more dialogue about is upcoming. This MSDN article (from the end of January) outlines CSS compatibility techniques and mindsets in IE7.

IE7 Quirks when using iexplore.exe.local

The good old iexplore.exe.local which worked from 3.0 to 6.0 now has a new quirk, IE7 writes a registry setting which often doesn’t play well with IE6. After using the previous Beta 2 Preview then switching back to IE6 there would be various issues with IE6. For the first preview many people (including myself) would have all links in IE6 load in their default browser… the address bar essentially became useless and one would have to reset the browser’s ‘home page’ option to test the rendering of something.

Jon Galloway came up with a batch file that would reset your registry to a IE6 friendly state – hopefully this won’t need to be done long term (changing it to a vbscript can make the process a bit less painless). The good news is that the new preview edition seems to not interfere with IE6 as much – I just get on average two dialog boxes a page asking me if I wish to continute loading (I have the latest IE7 preview installed and am running IE6 Eolas standalone).

Installation Options

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/update system files. You can still install a stand-alone version of IE 6 for testing purposes from running multiple browsers on a workstation. Note that if you are running Webroot Spysweeper (which is recommended for private machines for UCLA faculty and staff) you will most likely have to disable the program while installing or even temporarily have it not load on windows startup for the installation to complete itself.

Overview

Rendering wise the browser is really shaping up, and while a lot of the changes are playing catch up since 2001, there are some truly interesting features as well. Responses to the new user interface have been mixed, but that is constantly being tweaked as well. With Firefox 2.0 mainly being UI changes and the core, including most memory leak issues, probably not being adequately fixed until 3.0 it will be interesting to see what the future has in store. The mindset of both major camps seems to indicate that if there is a new ‘browser war’ it won’t lead to proprietary blink and marquee tags at least!