CHENNAI : Here you are, having just had a cup of tea, or coffee if that's your preferred poison, ready to check something out on the Internet — your email, perhaps the news, and some websites. If you are an Internet Explorer user, great news is in store: a new version of the browser with many new features is now available to the public for testing. If you are a Windows Firefox user, check out how the new IE might be able to tempt you back into its fold.

More compact

The new browser looks more compact, but as changes go, it might feel a little odd at first. The address bar and search bar are now in the top deck of the window where the application menu used to be. The application menu itself, for the large part, has been replaced by a "command bar" that offers most of the functionality of the menu bar through some excellent combinations and labelling. The application menu is now available only if you want it.

Tabbed browsing

The placement of the forward and backward buttons (to the left of the address bar) and the stop and refresh buttons (to the right of the address bar) is a little awkward. There is some nice, but not very compelling, defence about it in the IE blog and comments — that they are relevant to the page you are in, which is represented in the address bar.

We now get a new deck that houses the "Favorites Center" and the tabs for tabbed browsing, one of the biggest features in this release. The concept of tabbed browsing is simple: instead of opening pages in a new window, you can open related pages within the same window in different tabs.

Managing the tabs is easy with the "Quick Tab" button that appears the moment you have opened a tab. The Quick Tab button shows you a thumbnail image of each tab you have opened in the window and you can view a tab by just clicking on the thumbnail. This is one feature that Firefox doesn't have at present.

However, the IE 7 beta still has a few drawbacks with tabs: for one thing you cannot open a link in a new window with a mouse right-click option; you can do it only by clicking on the link while pressing the {lt}ctrl{gt} key.

You can also add a group of tabs to your favourites. This is useful for sites you find on a specific topic and want to check out regularly. Say you find a set of links from a tech blog that you find interesting, you can open them in new tabs and add the group under the folder "tech blogs" in your favourites. You can then open them in one go by right-clicking on the folder in your favorites center and selecting "open in tab group."

The next big feature in the new IE is reading RSS feeds. The little orange thingumajig that is now so familiar to many Firefox users now makes its appearance on the IE 7 command bar.

Adding a feed to your favorites is simple and easy although the functionality offered is not comparable to that of Firefox or other specialist feed-readers. You cannot open separate RSS headlines from one feed in different tabs in IE 7, while you can see all the headlines from the feed as "live bookmarks" and open them in separate tabs in Firefox.

The "Favorites Center" is just a sidebar that can be toggled between your favourites, your feeds and your history.

The nice thing about IE 7 is the ability to add and manage bookmarks and feeds from a "+" button next to the Favorites Center.

The new version also includes a search bar and you can choose your own search provider and set it as default. Other new features include the ability to clear complete browsing history, including cookies, autofill, temporary files, saved passwords, etc., in one go; anti-phishing filter; and SSL verification.

Please do not download the beta version at your workplace especially if you have browser-based applications. The beta program cannot co-exist with other versions of IE (unless you use some elaborate work-arounds).

Please do not download the beta version at home if IE is your primary browser: the layouts of some websites do not appear correctly.

This article is a preview of what you can expect from the new version when it is made available as a tested and safe version.

You can download the beta version from www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/ and can find an official running commentary of development at blogs.msdn.com/ie/.

The beta version is available for download only for Vista Beta and Windows XP with Service Pack 2.

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