The release, which is aimed mostly at tech enthusiasts, is a feature-complete beta, said Margaret Cobb, Internet Explorer group product manager. New features include dynamic security and privacy protection, as well as improved reliability and stability, according to Microsoft.
But it is a beta and we’re still taking feedback, fixing bugs, and working hard to ready the final release, Cobb said. Customers and partners have asked us to continue to be transparent on the work we’re doing and to release regular builds that they can evaluate and test. We’re committed to doing this.
IE7 beta 2 also boasts new platform features for Web and application developers.
We continue to encourage developers to test sites with this code because it is layout complete, meaning that the code is feature complete and no major changes are expected, Cobb said.
The most recent beta, which is actually the third for IE7, comes amid increased competitive pressure from other browsers, notably Firefox. IE7 will be the first IE release to have tabbed browsing a feature that has long been available on Mozilla’s Firefox.
Within its first year, Firefox was downloaded 106.4 million times, giving it an 8.65% market share as of last November.
Security is thought to be another reason why more users are turning to browsers other then IE. Because IE is by far the most commonly used browser, some consider it a target for security attacks.
The new IE7 test version was not affected by Microsoft’s latest round of monthly security patches, Cobb said. IE6’s address bar had been plagued by spoofing issues, which the company released a security patch for recently. This spoofing problem has been addressed with IE7 and the latest beta does not require the recent patch, Cobb said.
However, she stressed that IE7 beta 2 is a test version and lacks some of the fit and finish that will be implemented during the final stages of development, such as possible bugs and incompatibilities that will be fixed before the final release.
Microsoft plans to release one more beta before the final version is launched in the second half of the year, Cobb said.
An earlier beta version of IE7 was released in January, but was aimed mostly just at developers. A so-called alpha version was released last July, but it was made available only to certain testers and was not released to the public. Cobb declined to say how many beta testers there were for the previous IE7 beta releases.
With IE7, Microsoft has also expanded the platforms it supports to also include Microsoft Windows XP 64-bit Edition and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, in addition to Windows XP SP2.
