To start, Installation was pretty easy. I was able to run it in the background while I kept up on Digg and jammed out to my iTunes. I tabbed back to it every once in a while and needed to click a few buttons. Nothing to major. Perhaps blinking the task bar icon to get my attention would have been good, but it is Beta, so I won’t complain too loudly (or maybe it did blink and I’m just too used to that feature…).The main problem I had with the install was that I had to restart. I understand that “Windows works like that” and IE pretty much is the foundation of Explorer, but it is still annoying. I mean, in comparison to Firefox, I was up and running with it in less time than it took for IE7 to start installation (or do I give Firefox too much credit?).I’ve now just restarted and am going to find this beast and get it going. It didn’t install on my desktop… oh wait, it replaced IE6 or so it looks. Whoops, didn’t notice I checked that option. I don’t think it was there, perhaps I should have read the Terms.All Right, let’s open it. (4 seconds later) Well, a 4 second load time for a first run just after start up, that’s not bad. Let’s take a look at Firefox 1.5.1. (5 Seconds later) Well, I guess a second isn’t too much to complain about, although I did notice that IE initially loaded faster, but took a while to get the UI up, whereas Firefox did nothing until it completely appeared and then loaded Google.Onto the UI. Uhh… what? I guess I’ll have to blame this on the Beta stage that it is in, but these are not pretty buttons. And it looks like there are tons of borders around things that shouldn’t be there. Ah, maybe that’s the menu bar that isn’t on by default. I’ll try to turn that on as my first task in this product. (10 Seconds later) Got it! Not all too intuitive, but I found it in the tools menu… Looks like there are lots of options, so I’ll try to use it like they gave it to me by turning off the menu bar again.I think it’s fine to say that the Buttons are really, really terrible looking. I’m running in XP Classic Theme, but there is visible aliasing on those forward/back buttons… and that’s just not cool. Oh, I didn’t mention this, but I’m not all too impressed by the updated logo, looks even older than the current IE6/Win all blue logo.I should stop slamming the UI, I’ll just blame it on its Beta status.Onto the newest Feature: Tabs! The “New Tab” button looked like an ugly, broken tab, but it did make me look at it and hover over it, so it kind of did its job. It’s interesting that it opens an about:blank page, as opposed to just blanking out the url, but maybe that’s more standard…? I’m not sure. At any rate, it looks intriguing. Ooh, and there appears to be a new button for viewing all your tabs at once, I’ve got to see this! Mmm, that’s not bad at all! I know there is one of these for Firefox called FoXpose, but it takes about a year and a half to render all the tabs I run, this appears to do it a little faster and has a nice, little loading graphic to boot!Well, let’s go surfing. I’ve heard that speed has been increased on this b ad boy by a boy named Tyler, so I’ll check it out myself.(I enter google.com into the bar) Avast! I am being asked a question. I didn’t know this was going to happen, but there is an on/off button for the Phishing protection. I’m no dummy, but I can use all the help I can get, I’ll go ahead and turn it on. (3 minutes of surfing) Wow, that is noticeably faster. I can’t believe it was actually true… I knew Opera was faster than Firefox, but wow.I noticed a few of the new features, oddly enough. It appears that anti-aliasing has been turned on for all text now. I knew this from The Same Guy that talked about the blazing fast speed. I must say, I kind of like it. Now, I’m a mac user as well, so I’ve seed anti-aliasing on everything. I’m not used to it on my PC, but I could get used to it. I do love the jagged edges of a nice aliased font, but I do believe I could leave that behind me – as long as everyone else could to.One thing I did notice was that several sites (digg.com, tylersticka.com, and another undisclosed site) were improperly formatted. Now, I imagine that this was a result of IE7’s addition of CSS bug fixes, as well as fixes for a few IE-Only CSS Hacks that these sites were using. It could also be just poor programming, but we’ll see that as I get used to using it over a long period of time.Onto zooming and text size. I went ahead and tried zooming in (using the CTRL+, CTRL- & CTRL0 combinations) and it works… fairly well. On several sites rendering with CSS floats and absolute positioning it breaks the site, but the text and even the graphics scale better than I’ve seen in other browsers. However, I found the “text size” in the “Page” menu and it still has the “smallest, smaller, medium, larger, largest” silliness that IE6 has. Overall, the Zoom feature seems wasteful and the text sizes need to be renamed and re-thought.Final ThoughtsWell, there’s a whole lot more I could go into, but that appears to be what jumps out at me. It will be interesting to see how the community takes to this (I’ve already heard some bad things) and how the Development Team makes changes. Too bad this wasn’t a group effort through the community… but that would have to make the Source open, so we couldn’t do that! Plus, we’d just use Firefox anyway.The new UI scares me, the tabbing system is nothing pretty or intuitive to talk about, the menu structure is different (than any other WinXP program) and the HTML and CSS Rendering seems a little worse. wow, I just checked the memory use and it is taking about 46k when Firefox is only using 23k. Wow, and I thought Firefox took too much.However, it’s fast, it has a zoom function, it has tabs (finally), it accepts RSS, it… converts to PDF? Well, at least it is fast, that’s the best thing about it right now. It will be interesting to see where it goes in the next year and even more interesting to find out all the new hacks we’ll have to write for it!