A few months ago I posted about Ie7 beta 2. Yesterday beta 3 came out and I took it for a whirl. Overall it has some improvements (most of these seem to be following in the steps of Firefox.)
-Tab re-ordering has been added. This allows users to drag tabs to re-order. Unfortunately dragging a tab into an email or to the desktop doesn't give you a shortcut as expected.
- The icons have been re-freshed and overall they do look cleaner. The overall design of the browser is the same as in Beta 2.
- When viewing an image IE now uses a zoom mouse cursor to allow users to expand or contract an image in place. The behavior is much better then the auto-resizing toolbar from previous versions. Unfortunately there is a bug that you only see the mouse cursor change once you move the mouse away from the image and then return back.
- A rendering bug may have been introduced. The site digg.com started showing home page problems. (This could of course be an issue with the digg site)
- Some earlier bugs have been fixed with regard to zooming, rss reading etc.
The other change that's not so much visual is performance. IE7 beta 3 seems much snappier to launch and to navigate between pages.
Did I think about switching back?
Briefly. The performance does seem a lot snappier and most of the core features are similar. One of the things about FireFox that makes it 'sticky' is the large number of useful extensions and customizations that are not available for IE.