Wednesday, Microsoft made the first beta release of Internet Explorer 7 available to partners and MSDN subscribers. I've been keeping up with Chris Wilson and the other developers at the IE Blog, and I've been doing my damnedest to give them the benefit of the doubt. I was starting to get excited at the prospect of an IE release that took substantial steps toward compliance. I was all of a sudden an IE Optimist...

Installation:
When I first installed the app, I was greeted by the questionably titled "Microsoft Genuine Advantage" verification system. Sound familiar? Since Microsoft didn't exactly publicize this particular feature, the first time many will have heard of it is when someone figured out how to crack it within 24 hours of it's debut. Having legitimate software and wanting to know more about the experience than the avoidance of it, I went ahead with the process. .. Or at least I tried to. Genuine Advantage tried to open my default browser through which it would validate my software. My default browser is, of course, Firefox, so that didn't work. I was then prompted to download a seperate app, mid-way through my IE7 install, that would be able to validate on it's own. Not wanting to bother with that nonsense, I pasted the URL from Firefox into Maxthon and finished validation.

When I finally finished the installation process, I learned that it would require a full system restart. That means two things: poor user experience, and obtrusive browser OS integration. Wondering what I'd gotten myself into, I restarted.

Rendering:
Bootup took an extra minute or two as I watched a dialog window saying things like "Desktop Update". I knew was that I was getting a gang of "features" I did not sign up for, but I was still excited to see what this new rendering engine could do. Before I could test it, though, I had to open the browser, which involved several minutes of watching it flicker epiliptically on my screen. "Still in beta," I could hear Chris Wilson explaining in my head. When that was finally done I opened up this very blog. Due to an IE6 z-index problem, the tabs on my right sidebar currently have a white border between them and their content. I was disappointed to see that IE7 had not repaired this problem. In addition, the first paragraph of each entry, the first line of that paragraph, and the first letter of that line should have special type treatments, thanks to the CSS2 :first-child, :first-letter, and :first-line pseudo-selectors. These were also unsupported.

I was starting to get annoyed, so I opened Trillian so I could complain to my friends. I got a dialog that said Trillian was crashing at startup. Several more tries and a system restart later, I realized that it was the Trillian MSN Messenger plugin that was crashing, do to some part of the IE7 installation. I managed to disable the plugin and get Trillian running again, but now I can't use it to speak with MSN users.

Impressions:
Beta or not, this is ridiculous. The rendering engine is unrepaired and the app itself is more obtrusive than ever. Having won their latest court battle, Microsoft announced that IE will now be a "feature set" in Windows Vista. Not a standalone app, not a packaged app. "Internet Explorer" will be the name given to the ability of Windows to view internet content. IE is going to be with us for a long time.

Epilogue:
To be fair, IE has made several important improvements, including supporting :hover on all elements, supporting PNG alpha transparency, and showing up late to the HTML 4.01 party with <abbr>. This is all well and good, but these should never have been issues in the first place. Neither should any of the other "improvements" touted so proudly at the IE Blog. These are bug fixes, not enhancements, and there aren't enough of them to make running this bloated clusterfuck worth running. Browse Happy, everybody.

Update:
Just thought I'd chime in and mention that I'm currently unable to run IE7 at all, it just keeps flickernig and not allowing me to focus or select anything. Good thing there are still other options out there.