IE7 Impressions
My initial impressions are:
- Speed. IE is now the speed king easy, just trying to load a few sites like Digg and Slashdot, IE loaded them really fast relative to Firefox 2
- Attention to detail, little things like the help text that tells you about tabs when you open a new one, and the drop-down toolbars have mouse over focus, ie when you’ve opened one moving the mouse to the next opens that. Features like that are rarely seen in software because most developers don’t notice their absence. It is also intelligent to have a link to the history pane at the bottom of the back/forward drop down selection.
- No menus. This works, pretty well actually. Some of the drop down toolbar menu things are obviously there to replace the menus that are gone, and are a bit full, but you can tell they spent time trying to keep item count down, and also it’s great that the address bar now becomes the main feature of the application, rather than the menubar.
- The tab preview, tab is great. You can see all open tabs as large visual representations easily.
No cons? So far. Apart from the always worrying security issues and amusingly, some misrenderings 
Would I dare to use the most targeted browser out there? Perhaps. I’ll have to think about it.
Update – Next Day
Well, I miss inline spell-checking in textareas and forms and mouse gestures. But I’m pleased MS chose to copy the shortcuts that other browsers now use, ie middle click or CTRL-W to close tabs and middle click open links in background tabs.