It’s finally out, and looks pretty good to me so far. It’s pretty fast, and it has tabs, and it has tab thumbnails. It also seems to be a little bit more standards compliant.
The way they got rid of the menu is interesting. It seems hard to find things, but maybe I just have to get used to it.
They finally made Alt+D always select the address bar, instead of do nothing if you already have it focused. Ctrl+L strill brings up the dialog though.
The tab thumbnails screen is mapped to Ctrl+Q…
The RSS reader screen looks almost exactly like Safari. Whatever works, I guess. The whole thing feels way faster than Safari though.
It seems to eat up a lot of memory.. It’s at 94M in task manager after using it for about 15 minutes with 5 tabs open. I opened 5 roughly equivalent sites in Firefox, and it was at 37M. But the real test is how it behaves over time. Firefox seems really bad at letting go of memory after a while. Hopefully IE gets it right.
Anyhow, it might be good enough to stop using firefox for the moment.
Update: Memory consumption seems to be pretty steady so far. I’ve found one annoying bizarre behavior. If you close one tab among many, the next tab that gets focused is the one to the right, not the left, as it is in firefox. This makes the “open new tab next to current” option way less useful, since I like to open a new tab and then quickly close it and get back to where I was. Also, I don’t like how you can’t close a tab without selecting it first.
Update 2: Sadly http://www.vmware.com seems to get rendered improperly by IE7. I guess someone should have tested it with the beta or the RC. What? Don’t want to install beta software on your PC to test a website? well well, let me tell you about this magical prodcut called Workstation…