WinInfo Daily Update, February 1, 2006: IE 7 Beta 2 Preview Ships with New RSS Platform for XP

IE 7 Beta 2 Preview Ships with New RSS Platform for XP 

On Tuesday, Microsoft issued a public preview version of Microsoft Internet Explorer IE 7 Beta 2, offering Web developers, tech enthusiasts, and early adopters a chance to test the product's compatibility with their Web sites. Microsoft will release a more polished and consumer centric IE 7 Beta 2 in the weeks ahead. In my tests of the product during the past several days I've found it to be stable, secure, and feature packed. And even though I'm not personally ready to switch from Mozilla Firefox, I think many people will be pleasantly surprised by Microsoft's progress with IE 7.

IE 7 Beta 2 Preview is feature complete Gary Schare director of IE product management told me last week in a briefing. It's a developer and technology enthusiast preview release. Up until now we've been documenting the rendering and technical changes to IE 7, but people haven't had a way to test it against their sites unless they were in the beta program. IE 7 Beta 2 Preview is a safe release for early adopters or anyone who has a business need to understand where we're going with IE.

As I noted in my lengthy review of IE 7 Beta 2 Preview, Microsoft has made dramatic and impressive improvements in the new version. In addition to adopting features that other browsers have had for years, such as tabbed browsing and integrated search engine support, Microsoft has actually created new ways to use these features and has added unique new functionality. For example, a new Tab Groups feature gives you a tiled view of the browser's open tabs so you can more easily choose which document to view.

IE 7 Beta 2 Preview also includes the many security features Microsoft had been planning to offer in this product including its antiphishing technology, malicious ActiveX protection, international domain name spoofing protection, and support for high assurance certificates, an upcoming standard for proving the trustworthiness of Web sites. There is also a separate IE 7 runtime called Internet Explorer No Add ons which lets a user run IE 7 without any ActiveX controls or Browser Helper Objects loaded. This feature will be valuable if a PC or the browser is compromised and the user wants to browse the Web looking for help or to download a fix.

Notably, Microsoft also revealed this week that it is adding its Really Simple Syndication (RSS) platform, originally due only in Windows Vista, to the standalone versions of IE 7 that will ship on other Windows versions. This platform is available in the IE 7 Beta 2 Preview release and it will allow third parties to develop applications and services that interact with the RSS feed subscriptions users configure for use in IE 7. Schare told me that he expects the inclusion of the RSS platform on Windows XP to greatly increase developer interest in the technology 

IE 7 Beta 2 Preview works only with XP Service Pack 2 SP2, but the final release will also be made available for Windows Server 2003 and XP 64-Bit Edition. For more information and the free download visit the Microsoft Web site. Also, be sure to check out my exhaustive review of IE 7 Beta 2 Preview on the SuperSite for Windows.