We have MSDN at work, so I was quite excited to see that Microsoft had released Beta 1 of IE7 to MSDN subscribers.

In the time it took to down­load, take it home and find an oppor­tu­nity to install it, a lot of dis­cus­sion had taken place. Dave Shea got hold of a pirated ver­sion and was dis­ap­pointed. Molly asked every­one to be patient as beta 1 is early days yet, but Anne argued that usu­ally, Beta 1 is feature-complete.

Surely Microsoft must have expected this kind of back­lash… maybe not. Any­way, the IE blog responded fairly quickly to assert that yes, there was more CSS sup­port com­ing in future betas. They even listed what was planned, includ­ing CSS 2.1 Selec­tor sup­port, :hover on all ele­ments, PNG alpha trans­parency, and CSS 2.1 Fixed posi­tion­ing. I’m impressed, by both the fea­ture list and by their frank and open post about what will and won’t be done.

What I’m not impressed about, and what I haven’t seen much com­ment about in the blo­gos­phere (although in the Win­dows devel­oper com­mu­nity it’s been men­tioned a lot): it’s ugly. Really, really ugly. The tab bar looks sim­plis­tic, the menu is under­neath the tab bar (who reg­u­larly uses the menu, any­way?) and over­all, the inter­face doesn’t gel. I hope that gets lots of extra atten­tion in future betas.

Am I excited and hope­ful about IE7? Yes. Will I want to use it instead of Fire­fox? Uh, no. I’m glad they’re fix­ing those annoy­ing bugs (as the IE Blog so aptly put it, the “bang-your-head-on-the-desk bugs”), and it will be good to see some extra CSS sup­port, but once it’s released, it’s likely to be another 4 years before we see any­thing new, by which time Fire­fox will be up at ver­sion 20 or so, going by the cur­rent release sched­ule. Besides, the exten­si­bil­ity of Fire­fox has become it’s num­ber one fea­ture to me. Couldn’t live with­out my web devel­oper toolbar.