Despite being terrifyingly busy I found the time for some basic IE 7 beta checks this weekend. In general all CSS issues that Microsoft promised to solve have been solved, with the partial exception of the [attr] selector. The beta refuses to honour p[align=right] {font-style: italic;}. I updated my CSS compatibility table for the second time in two weeks.

I also went through all Explorer Windows bug reports and determined whether they were solved in the beta or not. I found that 58 old bugs have not been solved. See the Explorer 5-6 Windows and the Explorer 7 beta 2 category pages for more information. I also took the opportunity to remove a few reports that were orphaned for more than two months.

Finally, in JavaScript nothing much seems to have changed, although the crash on the normalize() method has been solved. I haven't yet done the rigourous DOM tests, that'll have to wait for another time.

The release of Explorer 7 beta 2 has raised some questions, especially about maintaining the various IE versions you may have on your computer. Basically the beta overwrites IE 6, and Joe Maddalone's Multiple IE instructions don't work, but you can uninstall the beta quite easily and IE 6 is restored to you.

I suppose I do a few people a favour when I write down clear installation and uninstallation descriptions and instructions. Here it goes:

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