When Microsoft released the Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 preview, I thought why not give it try. Well the initial first look feels great! With the tab browsing it is a move in the right direction. I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox for awhile and also tried out Opera, and the tab browsing is very useful. No more clicking at the taskbar to switch between the various new IE windows. The new layout of the various toolbar buttons were quite neat too.

Minor grouse: The new font display looks weird and it has also affected my MS Outlook font appearance. Not so big issue but it looks odd. I wonder if they are using the readable type fonts? Actually the readable font is not so readable. It just looks weird.

Major grouse: Now the my big downside, just found out that my McAfee Viruscan version 9 couldn’t function at all. I realised it was a problem when the auto updater just hangs there, and I couldn’t shut down my PC unless I use the Window Task Manager to close the McAfee running application or process thread.

Checking the IE MSDN blog I found a comment. It seems McAfee Viruscan 8, 9 and 10 uses Active X and somehow installing IE7 has altered fundamentally how the Active X should be used. There is no comment on the McAfee page, so I guess the McAfee guys haven’t come around to fixing it yet.

This is just bad. Because not only can I not get the latest anti-virus pattern update, I can’t even uninstall or reinstall the anti-virus.

I think I will have to somehow revert back to IE6 and wait till IE7 becomes stable and hopefully the McAfee guys also come out with a solution for Viruscan to have compatibality with IE7 as well.

Now I just need to figure out how to revert back to IE6… (sigh!)