So on a whim I downloaded and installed the first public beta of Internet Explorer 7. It seems to have installed some kind of Quartz like video layer or at least turned on anti-aliasing. The screen now looks a lot more like my Powerbook than it used to.
IE7 introduces tabbed browsing. A little late to the game but there it is. There is also a Exposé-like button that puts all the tabs on the same screen so you can see what you have open. It has a built in search bar and RSS feeds (again, a little late to the game).
Overall, it doesn’t make my eyes bleed like IE6 used to. But it is still torturously slow. The screen updates lag pretty severly. When you load my homepage via FireFox or Safari, the rendering engines in those browsers chew it up and spit it out pretty fast. IE6 would take forever and this beta of 7 isn’t much better.
So, I guess my bottom line recommendation: It is still beta, wait till it gets released for real. I will be.
Edit: I will wait till it goes gold before I even consider using it at work on my PC. It is very unlikely that I will replace FireFox with it anytime soon. As in ever.