Ever since beating down Netscape & Co however IE has been quite stagnant in terms of innovation, and has been one of the biggest security holes in an increasingly wild internet full of malicious code. A lack of competition imbued Microsoft with a sense of security in their dominant market position and so nobody saw any sense in spending money improving something with no realistic competition.
Internet Explorer 7 interface
That has been changing of late with the introduction of fresh-faced upstarts in the form of Mozilla Firefox and Opera among others. The introduction of new features such as tabbed browsing, the integration of the likes of RSS; and, arguably most importantly overall, the plugging of security holes has seen these browsers steal a fair enough chunk of IE's market share to make the industry sit up and take notice.
In response to this Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced that along with Windows Vista the world is to see a new version of Internet Explorer. This new and improved IE appeared then and seems now, as we have the second beta in our hands, to mainly be concerned with playing catch-up on the young pretenders.
New features
Introducing native support for tabbed browsing and RSS feeds are just two of the modernising steps Microsoft is taking with Internet Explorer (IE7). Ironing out bugs and plugging security holes, such as the always-open ActiveX controls which have caused so much headache in previous versions of the browser, are two of the other main concerns.
When you first fire up the beta it may take you somewhat aback to see the navigation bar ripped to shreds and the classic File, Edit, View toolbar missing from sight. Microsoft has taken the top of the browser window and treated it to a complete makeover. The navigation bar has the Back and Forewords buttons on the left hand side, and the Refresh, Stop and search bar to the right.
In default mode you have another bar beneath this. The first new icon is the star which, when clicked, opens a sidebar containing the favourites menu, RSS feeds and history. Integrated RSS is the feature everyone is hopping around with IE7. The prediction is that RSS will become substantially more mainstream as millions of Joe Windows Users discover its delights through IE7.
Moving right from the star one comes to the add/subscribe plus sign, which allows you to add individual pages or groups of tabs to your favourites, as well as allowing you to import/export favourites. Moving right again with multiple tabs open there is the Quick Tabs button, which allows you to quickly switch between images of all your open tabs. This can be handiest when you have a lot of tabs open in the one window and need to be able to distinguish them by more than simply name.