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February 1, 2006

Taking Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 preview through install and uninstall, step-by-step, with screenshots

developers, customer adventures, add-ins and toolbars — by TDavid @ 4:45 am PST

Bittorrent and private beta testers aside, and please correct me if I’m wrong, but yesterday’s release of the IE7 beta 2 for the general public is the very first opportunity to download and try IE7 with tabbed browsing and RSS support.

Dave Winer, the father of RSS as some refer to him, gave Microsoft’s official entry into RSS space some positive mojo but then left himself an out by saying that these days he was primarily a Mac user “these days” and hadn’t actually downloaded and tried the software. In other words, Dave is glad to see Microsoft join the party, he’s just not sure if what they are wearing is in style.

I saw IE7 downstairs from Rob Greenlee’s Webtalk Radio studio but didn’t actually play around with it. Tonight, you bet I was all over the opportunity to finally download that 11.2MB of bits and put it through the paces despite the somewhat ominous message:

Evaluation of Internet Explorer 7 should start now, but the software should not be used on production systems in mission-critical environments. Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview will only run on Windows® XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) systems, but will ultimately be available for Windows Vista, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, and Windows Server 2003.

These days installing beta software sometimes feels like jumping out of an airplane and checking and rechecking that you’re wearing a parachute. After downloading the IE7B2P-WindowsXP-x76-enu.exe it was time to click “Run” and hope for the best.

As the installation did its thing I wondered about if and when I’d soon need to restart the system. The opening screen (pictured above) not only suggested that, but backups too. Fortunately the machine being used didn’t have much in the way of important files on it. On our network all important files are sent to a shared drive and/or uploaded offsite. This machine could crash and burn and it would suck in the sense that we’d have to reinstall some programs, but little to no data would be lost.

The perfect guinea pig. Time to click “next.”

STEP 1. Validate your copy of Windows.
STEP 2. (default checked) Install the latest updates for Internet Explorer, and download and run the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool (recommended). This is some sort of anti-virus tool which scans the system and protects “your computer against security threats.”

STEP 3. Time to reboot.

STEP 4. The IE 7 experience begins …

Subscribing to an RSS feed is as easy as clicking on the orange feed icon that automatically illuminates when on a page that contains an RSS feed. A separate “Feed Center” exists inside the Favorites area.

The dysfunctional list
- The tabbed area on my test machine was a mess (see screenshot above) with sizable black blobs surrounding the tab area. The IE7 blog clearly indicates that there are still issues with IE7B2 as far as client user interface and this beta is more about seeing how sites look and allowing developers to test if their toolbars work.
- The Google Toolbar installed a few days ago seemed to be functional, as well as the older Alexa and MSN toolbar with the tabs which seemed to degrade without offering me two sets of tabs.
- Synergy would run, but could no longer connect to other machines.

I stayed with IE7 on this test machine all of a couple hours before hitting the add/remove section. This looks like it will have some possibly useful features but as the IE7 blog warns, this isn’t really ready for users yet. Accordingly, I will wait for Vista before making any hard fast determinations, but errors and buggy UI aside I was only marginally impressed with what’s there so far. Guess I’m taking Winer’s wait and see stance. It really is way too early.

How about the uninstall?
This was one part of the experience I was very curious about testing. Would I be able to go back to my IE 6 Service Pack 2 environment without problems? Would the issues experienced with Synergy be resolved? That was the only third party program running on the test machine that I noticed problems with, by the way.

STEP 5. The uninstall. Navigate to START -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs. Strangely, you won’t find Internet Explorer among the list of remove programs. This seemed like a real uh oh moment, but if you check the box for “Show Updates” you’ll see under the Windows section: Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview. and can click and then remove.

STEP 6. Software Update Removal Wizard springs into action. As I watched it delete and copy files, update the registry and more I wondered again what the state of this machine would be after rebooting. As a Windows user it’s a mixed bag with OS changes. I remember struggles I had getting ActiveSync functional and some past Windows OS upgrades have been less than pleasant (driver problems), so I’m a bit of a battered upgrade customer.

Turns out this removal was completely painless. The original environment was restored, Synergy worked again and the only noticeable traces were I had to reset the toolbar area layout in IE6. Nice work on this part, IE7 team.

Summary of findings
Install and uninstall were hassle-free. Overall operation of IE7 beta 2 on the test machine was mixed. The toolbar/UI section was crunched and disrupted to the point of being pretty much unusable. Websites I visited seemed to render OK. I would need to see a future beta or use a different test machine to better test this scenario further. The IE7 built-in phising tool is a nice plus, though I didn’t really get to see this in action. I didn’t test any other features or functions.

IE7 progress seems to be going ok overall. Based on my very limited exposure, and thus subject to change after a good sneeze, I’m still not convinced this will be ready for a Vista ship later on this year. I hope the next version comes pretty quickly as it seems like Beta 1 was in the fall 2005 and here we are in February 2006. The clock is ticking. One thing does seem certain:

Microsoft needs some fast exploring in their internet browser to get this thing shipped before year end.

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RSS Feed comments for this post 30 Comments »

  1. T, I can see you’re running some sort of custom skin, perhaps WindowBlinds. Is it possible that interfered with the rendering of the UI? I haven’t heard of anyone else seeing those black boxes.

    Comment by Nathan Weinberg — February 1, 2006 @ 10:00 am PST

  2. Thats holding your breath uninstalling IE. I uninstalled the IE7 Beta1 version and it hosed my OS. IE is too integrated into the system. Whihc, I don’t feel it should be. That reminds me of when MS went to court on their Monoply of browser being bundled with the OS. Not only is it bundled, but it’s usually part of it!

    I’ll be sticking with firefox…

    Comment by ^Lestat — February 1, 2006 @ 10:24 am PST

  3. That’s a PC Mag theme, Nathan, I didn’t try switching that off. so you might have something there. I have other machines I may test with this do not use this skin.

    Comment by TDavid — February 1, 2006 @ 10:30 am PST

  4. T, I’ve been experiencing some menu bugs over the last day. Uninstalled the Google toolbar, they went away. Try that.

    Comment by Nathan Weinberg — February 1, 2006 @ 11:08 am PST

  5. TDavid: You’re definitely experiencing a skinning bug with the black tab bar issue. Tablet Enhancements for Outlook has similar issues with WindowBlinds. Fortunately, you can disable WB on an application basis. The bug, BTW, is skin-specific, I’m running this new IE7 beta with WindowBlinds 5 and everything renders properly.

    More broadly, I agree with most of what you have to say. This is definitely a beta not suitable for general daily use for most people. It’s a bit slow and still has some rough edges. But I have seen enough since installing it yesterday to see that it does raise the bar and will be a welcome upgrade for the millions of people who use IE every day.

    Comment by Marc Orchant — February 1, 2006 @ 1:32 pm PST

  6. Yeah, it renders fine in my WindowsBlinds (version 5, skin:Arrow).

    Comment by Nathan Weinberg — February 1, 2006 @ 2:14 pm PST

  7. […] You can find one review here […]

    Pingback by Computer Supply Guide — February 1, 2006 @ 3:47 pm PST

  8. When I installed IE7 beta 2, some features in Visual Studio 2005 stopped working correctly, like when you are in design view, click on a DIV and in the Property little window you click on “…” button near “style”.

    Comment by Luigi — February 2, 2006 @ 3:07 am PST

  9. What a terrible review!! you managed to write several pages without actually covering any of the browsers features, comparitive or new, or wheather they worked well, even your mention of Rss was devoid of real content.

    Comment by DX — February 2, 2006 @ 4:52 am PST

  10. […] I was just browsing Memeorandum, as I sometimes do and found some links about IE7 beta 2 that was released recently. Here is one of them. […]

    Pingback by RamsThoughts » Blog Archive » IE7 beta 2 — February 2, 2006 @ 9:51 am PST

  11. Nathan Weinberg says:

    > T, I’ve been experiencing some menu bugs over the last day.
    > Uninstalled the Google toolbar, they went away. Try that.

    Same here, sad to say. Had loads of fun playing with buttons and then had to uninstall Toolbar 4 beta to get my system working correctly again. But I’m not ready to try IE7 yet ;-)

    Comment by Jack — February 2, 2006 @ 10:05 am PST

  12. […] IE7 goes so far as to put the RSS reader in same menu as favorites (or as TDavid puts it “A separate “Feed Center” exists inside the Favorites area.”), which appears in a left-hand navigation column. […]

    Pingback by Publishing 2.0 » RSS Is a Glorified “Favorites” Feature — February 2, 2006 @ 10:08 am PST

  13. DX - sorry to disappoint but this wasn’t intended to be an exhaustive IE7 review of features, note that the word “review” is missing from the title. I will likely review IE7 when it’s much closer to being done and runs properly on one of our test machines. Even the IE7 team says there are still UI issues, so why review something that the team says isn’t completely baked?

    As noted by others above, problems from our test might have been third party software like the Google toolbar or the PC Mag theme. Rather, what this piece was specifically targeting was how to install and uninstall IE7B2 for those who want to just look at it for a little bit, as I did. If you’d like an exhaustive review of IE7B2 features and functionality, there are several others out there.

    Comment by TDavid — February 2, 2006 @ 10:09 am PST

  14. I decided to uninstall IE7. I liked some of the features but would prefer the top toolbars were totally customisable, i.e. I’d like to remove the search box as I prefer to use Google Toolbar and the links etc, couldn’t be unscrunched from the right hand side very much making the space useless as far as I was concerned.
    One bonus feature IE7 left behind: At every boot my desktop icons are now the IE7 variety…I have to use TweakUI each time to restore them.

    Comment by Peter — February 4, 2006 @ 9:30 am PST

  15. After installing IE7beta some CHMs stopped working properly (some pages worked, some don’t). So I uninstalled it, restarted my machine and… :) Every time I enter any URL in IE6SP2, the page opens in Firefox (my default browser).
    I wonder wether Mozilla guys provided IE guys with extra funcionality behind this RSS icon :)

    Comment by Grzegorz — February 8, 2006 @ 3:09 am PST

  16. […] From microsoft’s website.  Last weeks release of the IE7 beta 2 was the first chance for many to download and explore things like RSS in Internet Explorer, apparently not much of an improvement over “favorites” or “bookmarks.”. Microsoft’ has video with the team up on Channel 9 (and that links to all the important stuff). There’s an FAQ at the official MS IEBlog. This site is usefull for information on CSS changes, security and so on. […]

    Pingback by Download IE7 beta 2 — My Stuff Archive — February 9, 2006 @ 2:56 am PST

  17. WindowBinds 4.6 and below does not work properly with IE 7. Window blinds 5 does.

    Comment by Mee — February 13, 2006 @ 7:38 am PST

  18. I try to remove IN7 beta2 and i saw different solution like remove the program in install and remove directory buy the inscription internet explorer is not in the list
    Marc

    Comment by Marc — March 6, 2006 @ 6:23 pm PST

  19. […] Bill Gates Keynote Video (Windows Media format) of the keynote. - started with tongue-in-cheek mention of YouTube listing for Bill Gates which has the famous pie in the face video, Bill Gates running like a girl, Gates celebrity deathmatch and others. - using software to create a new customer experience. Enhancing the experience in the browser and going beyond the browser. Gates described the “next generation browser” explaining they are hard at work on Internet Explorer 7. He points to three key areas: streamlined user interface, security and RSS - new release of IE 7 beta preview now available — DOWNLOAD HERE — as well as a compatibility center. Gates feels this will be “very heavily used.” Boy, what a contrast this all is to the day when Microsoft claimed IE wouldn’t be updated until Vista was released. Gates describes this change as “doing a mea culpa.” I’ve downloaded and will be reviewing IE7 beta preview in a separate post, but this was the biggest Microsoft release of the first day. Related from February 1: Hmm review of IE7 Beta 2 preview - Xbox360 as Media Center hub (nothing new) - Gates referred to the coming soon UMPC as the “lowend Tablet PC” device and showed the Samsung model (pictured above). - Gates gives the stage to MySpace with the announcement that they are now the #2 site on the web, passing MSN. I’m sure Microsoft doesn’t mind, since MySpace uses ASP.NET and SQL Server. […]

    Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Getting the Mix06 conference value yet? — March 21, 2006 @ 12:28 pm PST

  20. I’ve been trying to uninstall all night long. It goes through the motions and hangs up on the updating registry. In the Task Manager it’s running and using 50-100% of system resources, but goes no further. Any ideas?

    Comment by Paul Ternahan — March 24, 2006 @ 1:03 am PST

  21. Yeah, I’ve the same problem as Paul as well. The Uninstaller hangs up on the updating registry. Anyone has figured out a way to overcome this problem?

    Comment by George — March 28, 2006 @ 9:47 pm PST

  22. I got an email for the program manager, he gave me some very useful information. He asked if I had installed a custom sound scheme after I had installed IE7. Well I had just formatted my hard drive and IE7 was one of the first things I installed. Here are his comments to my response:

    That’s fine. If you used a custom sound scheme then I’m pretty sure I

    know what the problem is. It’s really weird, too. We were backing up

    reg keys that were created by IE7 (obviously a bug), but somewhere if a

    sub key was created (the sound scheme), then uninstall hung and we’re

    just using a setup API to do all the registry updates so it’s somewhat

    unknown to us. The fix was just to remove the keys from the backup list

    since they would never exist in IE6 anyway, but it was an awful

    consequence for a simple error.

    I know this isn’t much help now, I ended up doing pretty much losing this battle, I had to do a repair of XP, took a grand total of 30 mins or so. At least a format wasn’t necessary this time. Good luck hope this helps ans eases the pain a bit.

    Comment by Paul Ternahan — March 28, 2006 @ 11:32 pm PST

  23. Yah, I had used a custom sound scheme. But how do I go about removing the keys from the backup list? (What keys? What Backup list?) Sorry if I sounded like a fool, but I really don’t have a clue.

    Comment by George — March 28, 2006 @ 11:36 pm PST

  24. […] In February we stepped the last IE7 beta version through the paces complete with instructions for how to uninstall. That post will be used as a reference for seeing how Microsoft has done with nearly 90 more days of time to work through the feedback. Let’s get it on: […]

    Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Comprehensive IE7 beta 2 review [12 screenshots] — April 25, 2006 @ 4:11 pm PST

  25. […] Dozens of stories today about Google being concerned about Internet Explorer 7 having Live as the search default. Readers will recall last week’s comprehensive IE7 Beta 2 review included instructions for how to change the default search. It was one of the first things I did in IE7. […]

    Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Google’s bermuda cryangle: IE7 default search and being dumped by A9 — May 1, 2006 @ 8:00 pm PST

  26. Hi All,

    If you get the hang during updating registry just delete any custom sound schemes and all should be fine..

    Best Regards.
    Brian.

    Comment by Brian — May 5, 2006 @ 8:15 pm PST

  27. Paul and Brian, If I could see you, I would give a double thumbs up. I have been struggling with this uninstall for a couple hours. Who would of thought to blame the sound scheme. My custom sound scheme was just to disable most of the sounds, I find some of them very irratating and useless. So disabling it allowed me to uninstall ie7.

    Thanks.

    Comment by Shawn Smith — August 29, 2006 @ 7:36 pm PST

  28. […] According to Microsoft they have heard us, and if you haven’t heard the Microsoft news of the day, the official version of Internet Explorer 7 has been released. If you’ve also stayed away from all the beta tests [Hmm IE7 Beta 2 review], the major thing you’ll notice visually is a revamped toolbar section — where is the home key?!? […]

    Pingback by Here we blow again: the embarassing IE7 launch » Make You Go Hmm — October 19, 2006 @ 6:14 pm PST

  29. I am having loads of probs with the new IE7 if i delete it will i have probs getting IE 6 back ?

    Comment by Sheila Marion — October 19, 2006 @ 6:14 pm PST

  30. Not sure if you can revert, Sheila :( I haven’t tested that with the new official version. Worked fine with the beta, but this is new territory. If any other readers know the answer to Sheila’s question please respond.

    Comment by TDavid — October 19, 2006 @ 6:16 pm PST


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