Microsoft preps IE 7 Beta 3 for August

After years of letting Internet Explorer 6 languish with no new development, prompting criticism from both outside and inside the company, Microsoft promised that they would shift their priorities and deliver a steady stream of updates to their venerable browser. The company released IE 7 Beta 1 to the public in January. While some applauded the new features, others were perplexed by the bizarre user interface arrangement—specifically, the menu bar being sandwiched between the address bar and the tab bar. Some felt that the browser was still playing catch-up to competitors such as Firefox.

Beta 2 went public in April, after Microsoft announced that the layout and rendering engine for IE 7 was "feature complete" and that no new changes, other than bug fixes, would be made outside of the user interface.

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Now Microsoft is preparing a third beta, to be released some time in August. The extended beta period seems to have been prompted by compatibility issues that users have found with the first two IE 7 betas. One such issue, described in great detail on Microsoft's IEBlog, involved a problem where the browser would sometimes reload CAPTCHA images (character recognition tests used to fool spambots) when a network connection was idle:

Eric Lawrence of Microsoft stated that "for compatibility reasons, we're going to revert to IE6 behavior for IE7 Beta 3 to prevent this exact issue."

The Beta 3 release is expected to fix problems with some of the new features, such as the integrated RSS reader. Beta 3 will add an ability to control whether or not an article is marked as read. However, don't expect any major interface changes. According to an interview with IE 7 developers, there will be no new abilities to customize the interface, for example to put buttons and menus in customizable locations:

"Unfortunately, extensibility in IE7 is not where we want it to be," said Microsoft's Max Stevens, lead program manager in charge of IE 7's user interface. "We don't expect there to be many changes between now and ship, though this is definitely an area we're investigating for our next release."

The final release of IE 7 is expected to be some time this winter, and Microsoft has promised continual updates each year thereafter, starting with IE8, which will contain new networking and rendering features.