Microsoft today released Beta 3 of Internet Explorer 7. The main changes are around the user interface, though there are also improvements to tabs, RSS feeds, and security. You’ll have to uninstall any previous versions of IE7 before installing the new beta. According to IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch, this is the last beta version, meaning we’ll see only release candidates until IE7 goes gold.
There’s a great overview of the interface changes up at the IE Blog. The stop, refresh, and search buttons have all been lightened, which is good as they don’t clash as much now. There’s horizontal lines separating the links toolbar from the rest now too! I don’t remember if Beta 2 had it, but when you type a URL in the address bar, the refresh button changes to become a “Go” button with an arrow. They have finally made the awkward image zooming from IE6 much easier to use as well.
And my favorite change? You can now drag and drop tabs to reorder them! I wish Firefox had this feature too, it’s so useful when you’ve got a lot of tabs open at once. IE7 isn’t the first to have this feature though, Opera 9 has tab reordering as well.
MasterMaq's Blog 
Hey Mastermaq,
Glad you like the new beta! I’m a big fan of tab reordering as well :).
Keep browsing!
Hmm, what version of Firefox are you using? I am able to re-order tabs in 1.5.0.4 (without extensions).
Actually Kyle, you may be right. I have had a tab extension installed for so long, I assumed that was what made it work in Firefox. I am runnng 1.5.0.4 as well, and it works, I just thought it was the tab extenions that enabled it!
Thanks for the comment Max. The other thing I have noticed since posting this, is that Beta 3 doesn’t seem to be quite the memory hog Beta 2 was (though it still uses quite a bit).
Keep it up!
This isn’t related to IE7, but if you like being able to re-order stuff…check this out http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm
Lets you drag & re-order items on your taskbar. Which I find delicious.
How is Beta 3 with respect to W3C compliance? I believe I noticed a previous version of IE7 broke a few of the rules…
Well Beta 2 and Beta 3 are using the same rendering engine, as it was made feature complete for Beta 2. That said, I have found that IE7 renders most things very similarly to Opera 9, and both of them are closer to spec than Firefox 1.5 seems to be at the moment (I’ve been coding XHTML 1.1 (so XHTML 1.0 Strict) pages, and there are only minor differences in how the three browsers render elements on the page, but moreso for Firefox).
I don’t believe they ever planned to have IE7 pass the Acid2 test though. But I’m more than happy with it, it’s much better at standards support than IE6 was.