Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I’m not happy with the fonts in IE7b2. Let me give you an example, from this very page:

As you can see, IE doesn’t properly antialias its fonts like Firefox does, making them look somewhat chunky. Even though they now let you scale fonts to an arbitrary size, what’s the point if they don’t look good? Here’s a closeup that might help you notice the difference:

I can’t figure out why they are doing such weird antialiasing, but it doesn’t look sharp or professional.

Internet Explorer Beta 2 Preview introduces a new and very cool feature that they call quick tabs. Yes, this is a feature that Firefox has not come up with, which is an efficient graphical display of the content of your tabs. At any point while using the new IE, just hit control-q and up comes the quick tabs display:

As you can see, IE7b2 organizes the tabs into a matrix with small picture previews of each website. From this page, you can choose to switch to a tab quickly, or close given tabs.

You’d better restart after installing IE7b2 when it asks you too, otherwise you’ll be greeted with the following error message:

“The procedure entry point InternetGetSecurityInfoByURLW could not be location in the dynamic link library WININET.dll”