Beta 1 was really just plumbing. There was a little bit of user interface shown there, but it was pretty light. This release is much richer from an end-user perspective, as well as even on the security front. There is a lot more there. |
I'd recommend that users running IE at home especially give Beta 2 a try. Its security benefits outweigh any risks of using beta software. |
IE 7 Beta 2 Preview is feature complete. 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. |
Our key focus was coming up with technology to help protect users from technology attacks, attacks on the software itself. |
RSS is probably the biggest area of innovation in IE 7. We've done work both on the end user to expose the average user to RSS in a really great way and we've done a lot of work on the platform to enable RSS for any application to take advantage of. |
The ones that really matter are those in Windows. |
The target audience is technology enthusiasts. But it can be broadly used. We feel very good about it. |
There are two primary ways that drive-by downloads are done, either through a vulnerability in IE itself or an add-on, or because the user has the security setting set too low. |
We'll continue to do performance tuning and bug fixes, and improve the reliability through the beta process. |
We'll support Beta 2 with security updates, either as a patch [via Windows Update] or as a new release. |