Record fast software eval - thumbs down to IE7

Wow, that was a record for me. I finally got around to installing Internet Explorer 7 (beta 3) to play around with it. It took me all of 45 seconds to determine that it won’t be unseating Firefox as my primary browser. What did I find in those 45 seconds?

• Closing the last open tab closes IE. I mean honestly, what other apps work that way? Certainly not Firefox, Word, Excel, Visual Studio, or any other app I use.
  
  Actually, the behavior is even a little weirder than it sounds, because if you only use the mouse, there is no way to close the last tab. The little “X” in the tab doesn’t appear, and the Close context menu item is grayed out – you have to use the keyboard (Ctrl-F4 or Ctrl-W) to do it. So it’s possible that Microsoft’s intent is that “closing the last tab” isn’t supposed to be supported at all.
  
  In Firefox, closing the last tab really means replace the current tab with a blank one. This behavior makes far more sense to me than IE’s.
  
• Opening a tab in the foreground or background is an all-or-nothing affair. That is, you can set IE to open new tabs (when clicking  “Open Link in New Tab” or using the middle mouse button) either in the foreground or background, but it’s a global setting that is always in effect.
  
  In Firefox, you can control this on a link-by-link basis – a feature that I use all the time.
  
  UPDATE – I was wrong, there is in fact  a way to control this per-link. What threw me off is that the middle mouse button handling is inconsistent. Ctrl-left click opens a new tab, using the default foreground/background setting. Shift-ctrl-left click opens a new tab using the opposite of the default (foreground if the default is background, or vice versa). The middle mouse button performs the equivalent of a Ctrl-left click, so you’d think that Shift-middle click would be equivalent to Shift-ctrl-left click, wouldn’t you? But it isn’t. I consider this a bug in IE (don’t know if the IE team would agree), and I hope it gets fixed for the release.
  
  UPDATE 2 - I've reported this a bug to Microsoft. If you agree that this should be fixed, go here and vote for it.

Just those two things are enough to keep me on Firefox. Of course, even if those two features worked as I wanted, Firefox’s amazing extension system would keep me (and a lot of power users) from switching back to IE.

On the other hand, I’m guessing IE7 will be good enough to stem the tide of migration for the casual user, which I suspect is Microsoft’s primary goal anyway.

As a side note, MS still hasn’t fixed the bug which prevents you from controlling the order of items in subfolders of the Links folder. I’ve hated IEs entire bookmarking system almost since it’s inception, and that seems to have gone virtually unchanged in this release. Maybe in IE8.