I'm on record as saying that Internet Explorer 7 "has no soul," and I haven't changed my opinion one jot about that. Microsoft was moved enough by Firefox and Opera to actually make changes to its market-leading browser, but the changes are very minor, and few of them have any originality at all.

However, significantly improved security of IE7+ with protected mode browsing and antiphishing is worth cheering about. Like UAC, IE7+ prompts you endlessly about whether you want to run applications and so forth, without any ability to remember your answers by specific Web site or application name. While there are good security reasons for doing that, it takes the joy out of Web surfing, at least for me.

Additionally, the fact that IE7+ offers tabbed browsing means it's no longer operating in the user-interface Dark Ages.

Perhaps the best news, though, isn't about features in IE7+, but about Internet Explorer's future. Bill Gates at WinHEC and also Gary Schare, Internet Explorer 7's lead product manager, have committed to major updates of Internet Explorer on a roughly every-18-month time frame. That means the next release of Internet Explorer, probably sometime in 2008, could be a far more interesting product.

I'm still not a big fan. I still use and prefer Mozilla's Firefox. Internet Explorer 7 doesn't change that. But for confirmed Internet Explorer users, there is no downside to IE7+. It's a much better browser than IE6.