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The first thing that strikes you about IE 7 is that the interface is considerably slicker than IE 6 and sports the kind of interface we can expect from Windows Vista later this year.

Not only is the program interface changed, the graphics - and particularly the font rendering - appear vastly improved.

One feature that Firefox users will want to know is, what about the tabbed browsing? The tabs are there. New tabs can be accessed via a small blank tab or, as with Firefox, via Ctrl/T.

One dramatic new feature is 'quick tabs', which displays all the open windows as thumbnails in a separate window. Similarly there is a zoom tool that enables a user to see a page at between 10 per cent and 1,000 per cent, which is nice for those with big monitors able to view a whole page without a scroll. Similarly you can now shrink a web page so that if fits properly on a printer without cutting off the edges.

The new IE has its own search box built in, which is probably designed to make the popular toolbars redundant. To its credit, though, IE 7 did honour the fact that my default search engine is Google although it popped MSN search underneath just in case I felt like an alternative.

Another trumpeted feature is 'instant RSS feeds'. If a site offers an RSS feed, you simply click on the RSS button (design courtesy of Firefox) to display the feed from the site you are on.

Given the headaches

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that have accompanied IE 6, Microsoft has gone to some pains to improve the security of IE 7.

For example, at the beginning, the program asks whether it should set an 'anti-phishing' filter to check if a site is 'impersonating' another. When enabled, a user can choose to check a particular website against a database of known phishing sites held by Microsoft.

Other improvements include protection against cross domain scripting attacks, anti-spyware safeguards and a 'protected mode' to guard against elevation of privilege attacks

Microsoft has also been forced into a somewhat humiliating climb down over ActiveX. Once trumpeted by Redmond as an alternative to Java, the company now admits that ActiveX is often a liability. There is now an ActiveX opt-in that will disable entire classes of controls from IE 7.

IE 7 is at last implementing transparent PNG support that should kick-start a new round of special effects on web pages. Another nail in the coffin of ActiveX is that IE 7 will also offer support for XMLHTTP so that AJAX-based Web applications no longer have to rely on ActiveX to work.

Some things have not changed. In a quick test of some files with the IE 7 beta, Microsoft's adherence to cascading style sheets conventions have not improved, so CSS developers will have to continue with their workarounds for a while yet. Microsoft has promised that Internet Explorer 7 will be shipped with improved CSS 2.1 support including the ability to hover on all elements, fixed positioning, CSS 2 selectors and HTML 4.01 improvements although little seems to have made its way to the Beta yet. We can but hope.

Although not perfect by any means, IE 7 is a big improvement on version 6 - particularly in the font and page rendering. It feels like a 21st Century browser and just shows what Microsoft can do when it has a little competition.

The beta is available at the Microsoft web site.