Thank’s to the Kevin’s blog from the Sitepoint (and their brillant newsletter too), I’ve installed IE7 beta 2 on my development machine. The first positive thing about it is that it even works under non-english versions of Windows XP. Previous ‘not so public version’ I’ve tried has worked only under english version of os. At the first glance it looks very cool and promising:

• finally it has the tabs support. Even the keyboard and mouse shortcuts for them are same as in other browsers (f.e. middle click on the link to load it in the background, or middle click on the tab to close it)
• according to several web sites - f.e. this post on IE Blog site - they have done major changes in their rendering engine to increase IE’s compatibility with web standards. This is very big advancement from the Microsoft side, as they always were doing things by ‘their way’. With IE7 attitude is different, thanks for example to above mentioned IE Blog. In short words - they are working with web community to make IE7 better (i assume that it is caused too by high quality competitiors such as Mozilla Firefox and Opera)
• user interface is optimized to show more web space. In my opinnion - it looks quite cool, but it will take some time to learn for common users
• search bar is introduced - similar to one found in Firefox or Opera. The great and almost unbelievable thing here is that default search engine is Google :]
• RSS support - similar to Firefox one

There are also a lot of smaller things such as ‘Phising filter’. The strange thing is that they do not display SSL certificate owner in visible place when SSL powered site is opened (as it is done in Firefox and Opera).

Anyway this version is very promising. Especially for common users as they can finally see how good browser should be. For developers - the rendering engine changes are something cool - less IE hacks, more time to code other things ;) Of course at the very moment extension powered Firefox has much more to offer for web developer (such as great javascript console, web developer toolbar, live http headers and more). But this new version will be hard to beat for new generation browsers as the Firefox and Opera are. Of course - IT pros and developers will know the difference. But the difference won’t be so huge as before. So, for good or bad, IE will probably regain some of it’s market share as most of the users aren’t web developers or IT related professionals.

I hope that Microsoft will focus more on security too. We all know how many ‘critical’ bugs were found in IE rendering engine, the bugs that have affected all software that was using this engine for own purposes (such as Outlook Express for example, who had/has a lot of it’s own bugs as a bonus ;) ). If the security will be better - this 7th release of IE can be real competitor for Firefox and Opera.
And as we all know - competition is good for clients/end users so maybe it will also add some power to Firefox and Opera development teams ;)