IE7 Preview

I've been using IE7 Preview for the past week and it's been great! Some of the first things you'll notice is the sleek new UI, integrated search providers, tabbed browsing (yes, everybody asked for it), a cool new Quick Tabs preview pane, a new Favorites Center, RSS feeds, bi-cubic zooming, a new print preview and of course the Phishing Filter!

IE7 Quick Tabs

IE7 Favorites Center

One of the first things I found strange is that text on IE7 was sort of
blurred than before. It turns out that this is because IE7 enables ClearType by default. This is a bad default, since most of us are not using LCD monitors, but you can quickly turn this off by going to Tools->Options->Advanced and clearing the 'Use ClearType' from the Multimedia section.

Another surprise you'll see is that if you go to google.com or yahoo.com for the first time, the sites will be providing a dialog to add them as an OpenSearch search provider for IE7.

Surprisingly Google is  the default search provider in IE7 out of the box when I installed it. (?) Even then, this is what I got when I first visited Google.

I do get a lot of spam, and my Outlook 2003 spam filter does a decent job of catching 99% of them. But occasionally one or two of them slip into my inbox and today I got one of those famous Citibank phishing emails in my inbox. I don't click on links in such emails, but wanting to try out the new phishing filter in IE7, I went ahead.

Phishing Filter in Action (click to enlarge)

Cool!... IE7 correctly identified the site as a phishing site. Thumbs up! If you want to try this out, click this phishing link!

Finally, the Feeds feature gives you easy access to view and add your favorite RSS feeds. See how it shows my blog feed.