Ina Fried at News.com writes about the Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview End User License Agreement and a few interesting things within.
As the article says, the IE7 EULA starts with an unfunny lawyer joke, moves on to thanking you for choosing Microsoft, and then proceeds to say that you don’t have the right to use the browser in a production environment. I guess by declaring IE7 to be “as-is”, Microsoft is covering its own ass in case there’s a security exploit in there that wipes out half the internet, or your latest blog post.
Is there a copy anywhere online?
Meanwhile, I looked at the release notes, and they contain a list of known bugs (one that I’m sure is expanding now that it’s public). There are a bunch of JAWS bugs, IE7 can disable Windows OneCare (it didn’t for me), IE7 breaks Windows XP Repair Install, and a few other issues.
Also, it is important for developers and users alike to be aware that IE7 disables ActiveX controls, DHTML scriptlets, the Channel Definition Format, DirectAnimation, XBM, weak SSL ciphers, the _SEARCH sidebar, the telnet protocol handler, the SysImage URL scheme, and status bar scripting, as well as a few other minor things.
Also, things I personally want to point out:
Be aware that some poorly or strictly designed websites may report that you are using an unsupported browser, as the browser user string reports itself as IE7, and some look for specific numbers and not just IE 5.x and above. You can revert the user string in the Registry, which is a terrible option for many users. I told a few people at Search Champs that, at least in the beta, there should be a menu item to do this, like Opera does, but clearly the IE team either did not think of it, or did not have enough time.
IE7 no longer breaks Google Maps API-based websites. The IE Blog says if you have IE7 Beta 1 installed, you must uninstall it first.
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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