Very few individual applications have managed to cause quite such a stir over the course of their lifetime as Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Love it or loath it, Microsoft's little browser that could has played its part in pioneering modern internet history; becoming an integral part of the Windows operating system as well as the undisputed champion of the viscous browser wars.

Ever since beating down Netscape & Co however IE has been quite stagnant in terms of innovation, and has been one of the biggest security holes in an increasingly wild internet full of malicious code. A lack of competition imbued Microsoft with a sense of security in their dominant market position and so nobody saw any sense in spending money improving something with no realistic competition.

Internet Explorer 7 interface

That has been changing of late with the introduction of fresh-faced upstarts in the form of Mozilla Firefox and Opera among others. The introduction of new features such as tabbed browsing, the integration of the likes of RSS; and, arguably most importantly overall, the plugging of security holes has seen these browsers steal a fair enough chunk of IE's market share to make the industry sit up and take notice.

In response to this Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced that along with Windows Vista the world is to see a new version of Internet Explorer. This new and improved IE appeared then and seems now, as we have the second beta in our hands, to mainly be concerned with playing catch-up on the young pretenders.

New features

Introducing native support for tabbed browsing and RSS feeds are just two of the modernising steps Microsoft is taking with Internet Explorer (IE7). Ironing out bugs and plugging security holes, such as the always-open ActiveX controls which have caused so much headache in previous versions of the browser, are two of the other main concerns.

When you first fire up the beta it may take you somewhat aback to see the navigation bar ripped to shreds and the classic File, Edit, View toolbar missing from sight. Microsoft has taken the top of the browser window and treated it to a complete makeover. The navigation bar has the Back and Forewords buttons on the left hand side, and the Refresh, Stop and search bar to the right.

In default mode you have another bar beneath this. The first new icon is the star which, when clicked, opens a sidebar containing the favourites menu, RSS feeds and history. Integrated RSS is the feature everyone is hopping around with IE7. The prediction is that RSS will become substantially more mainstream as millions of Joe Windows Users discover its delights through IE7.

Moving right from the star one comes to the add/subscribe plus sign, which allows you to add individual pages or groups of tabs to your favourites, as well as allowing you to import/export favourites. Moving right again with multiple tabs open there is the Quick Tabs button, which allows you to quickly switch between images of all your open tabs. This can be handiest when you have a lot of tabs open in the one window and need to be able to distinguish them by more than simply name.

Preview of open tabs

Sadly the tabs themselves can't be reorganised any which way you like, as can be done in Firefox for example; but this being a beta we can hope that Microsoft's lot will do yet more catch up on the open source pretender before we see the final product.

Moving past the tabs to the far right one first comes to the Home button, which not only allows you to visit the home page, but also manage it. You can have multiple tabs open as your home page which is grand if you want to pop open a few news sources alongside a search engine in the morning, though it can be a bit tiresome if you want to open a new browser window and find three or four tabs opening alongside.

The RSS button allows you to subscribe to feeds where available, and next to it is the Print button. Microsoft has thankfully fixed printing with IE7, and pages can now be shrunk to fit pages. Next is the Page button which has all the usual options like Save and View Source available (remember that the classic toolbar is missing by default.)

Finally there is the Tools button which allows you to do things like go to full screen, manage toolbars and manage internet options. Anyone who is particular about their browsing experience might want to angle their mouse in this direction first thing.

Under the hood Microsoft is promising to make vast leaps towards full CSS compatibility, and while it has not all been implemented yet the promise is that come Vista, IE7 will be a much more standards compliant browser than its predecessors.

Saying that, as our own webmaster Fredi Gross pointed out "We all agree Internet Explorer is bad for not supporting standards. Well Firefox can be quite stubborn in that respect as well. What I mostly care if I write some HTML lines is that it looks the same in all browsers. All three major browsers for us (IE, Firefox and Opera) have a different opinion about rendering the page."