Today Microsoft released the second beta of Internet Explorer 7. It's not really intended for the general public, but for IT administrators and web developers to test with. You can get it here.

The IE7 application itself is in great shape. I like the new interface look and feel, and they eliminated all the toolbar clutter that IE6 and previous had. And despite the fact that most people use standalone RSS readers, I still think it's handy to have built-in support just in case.

Of course, the real test for a browser is how it renders web sites and applications. I expect there remains a lot of work to be done, since they have made quite a few changes to the rendering engine. CSS in particular has been tuned considerably. I've already had some trouble with Blogger.com. But I don't think these issues are going to be as big a deal as they would have been in the past. If people are willing spend time tuning their websites to cater to a browser with a tiny fraction of the market (*cough* Firefox *cough*), then they had better not make a sound about testing for IE7 compatibility.

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