I woke this morning to find out, via Elliott, that IE7 Beta 1 had been released. So I headed off and logged into my MSDN subscription to download the beta install.

First impressions are that the new user interface is clean and with the introduction of tabs a great improvement. However it seems that they have thrown a few of the UI design rules out the window – for example normal Windows UI design has the menu bar at the top of the window – not two levels down beneath the address and tab bars.

Interestingly browsing to a new website brings up the “Microsoft Phishing Filter” which offers to check all the websites you visit to see if they are impersonating a trusted website. Also middle click to open in new tab is supported – working the same way as Firefox. :-).

Things are looking good for IE7 Beta 1 or Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)).