Crave enjoys Internet Explorer 7

By Rory Reid on 03 February 2006, 10:26am

Internet Explorer 6 is still the most widely used browser in the world, but geeks know there are some excellent alternatives that offer much more interesting features. Crave has already been seduced by the charms of its main rivals, Firefox and Opera, but we were keen to try out the second public beta version of the forthcoming Internet Explorer 7.

Our first impressions of IE 7 were very positive. It has a clean overall look, and the long-promised tabbed browsing feature works well. You can't move tabs around to switch the order in which they appear, but they can be displayed as iconic representations of their respective pages -- a neat trick not seen in other browsers.

IE7 beta 2 is compatible with RSS feeds, and unlike other browsers, there's a new engine that renders the feeds so you won't see any confusing Web code. There's also anti-phishing technology, which uses heuristics to check a site's legitimacy, and an advanced pop-up blocker that displays the Web address of any persistent ads so you know their exact origin, and whether to permanently block them.

We experienced some minor bugs, but these were mostly limited to a small percentage of pages not displaying correctly. We're not quite converted, but we're pretty pleased with what we've seen so far. You can download IE7 beta 2 from Microsoft's site. -RR