Microsoft have just released the first IE7 Public Beta . As Rod mentioned the Beta installs over the top of your existing version of Internet Explorer, which for testing purposes is not ideal. Below is a workaround that allows you to run IE7 in a standalone mode alongside your current browser setup.

• Download the installer (IE7B2P-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe) as usual but DO NOT run it.
• Extract the contents of the installer to a folder using Winrar or similar.
• Delete the following files from the extracted folder:
  • update (folder)
  • install.ins
  • spmsg.dll
  • spuninst.exe
  • spupdsvc.exe
• Create a blank text file in the folder and name it “iexplore.exe.local”
• Run IE7 by launching “iexplore.exe” from within the folder.

First impresions are that it still looks very much like a beta product (no surprises there). Having visited a couple of notable CSS sites there still seem to be display quirks evident but these could be due in part to the nature of some of the more popular CSS hacks that are used to support existing versions of IE.

The “Quick Tabs” control is VERY cool, but I would like to have also seen a more intelligent approach to the tabs themselves. When you have a lot of tabs ope the title of each quickly becomes unreadable (yes, I know, this problem exists in Firefox too) and it would be nice to be able to close a specific tab without having to first navigate to it. The “Feeds” button doesn’t seem to be picking up RSS feeds either.

More when I’ve had a proper poke around and done some comparative testing.

Note: Microsoft do not endorse or in any way support the side by side running of multiple instances of Internet Explorer. That said, it seems to works just fine