IE7 The Good the Bad and the Buggy

Being the good beta tester that I am I feel it"s my duty to report annoyances or bad behavior that occurs in Microsofts new re-rebranded web browser. I have to wonder if they decided to drop the + (which is still present in Release Candidate 1) because of a few little features I feel are still missing from the latest build of IE.

Bearing in mind that Microsoft has all but locked down Windows Vista with the release of RC1, all we can expect now is a boot screen, a cool sound scheme and maybe graphical niceties related to logon.

We won"t see any major changes in the way applications work unless they are glaring bugs.

So do I have to wait for Windows Internet Explorer 8 to see a few basic things I"m missing in WIE7? For the past year or so I have been using Firefox, mainly because Neowin is undergoing development and I have to ensure that Neowin works in all major browsers. Now I am on RC1 I have been using WIE7 since the weekend and heres what I miss:

• A spell checker (really handy for typing up newsposts, its in Firefox 2.0 Beta 2).
• Smart tabs, when I open a link in a new tab and then close it I am taken to the last tab in the row, Firefox takes me back to the tab I was on when I created the link. Smart.
• A download manager (scheduled for Windows Internet Explorer 8)

and thats without going technical, like ability to run script operations from the infobar. I need to go to Internet options and add Neowin to the trusted zones in order to use the Add news console on our content management system. That kinda opens up a whole can of worms when theres a vulnerability in one of our scripts, like the forum for example (hey Matt it does happen). IE will simply run the script operation anyway because it"s in the trusted zone -oh er! Although I will admit, I can run script operations temporarily, its just a pain in the butt to have to go through that process everytime.

The last annoyance I can"t seem to get my head around is that Windows still likes to open links in new windows rather than a tab, if somebody sends me a link through Live Messenger instead of creating a new tab in the Explorer window I have open it simply opens up a new window. Why?

Features that I do love is the new RSS feed reader within Explorer and the thumbnail view is funky too, I find that I don"t use it that much because I can see in the tab bar what I have open. The UI is very nice too and the black title bar doesn"t annoy me at all when maximized. Talking of the title bar, another cool feature is the way IE shows the user that I am on a secure website by coloring the bar and changing the refresh icon to a padlock.

Anyway, feedback appreciated I am off to Connect to report these.