There have been a couple of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 reviews. They all have one thing in common - they are pretty much dismissive.

A couple of insightful postings:

Some memorable quotes:

Is it just me, or does this look like a GUI widget test demo? 3 different styles of buttons, in various colors, in seemingly random arrangement. Tabs squished in between other semi-related buttons. - Leslie Michael Orchard

my god, they’ve made XP’s Fisher Price look good

Apparently, IE7 still has only limited support for the current web standards such as RSS (yes, it can display the headlines, but it’s totally useless as RSS aggregator), XHTML (you know, this six year old HTML standard which plays nicely with XML) or the SVG vector graphics format you can use with Firefox or an Adobe Plugin to IE6 (which was recently required to see the graphs at Google Webstats, and will likely be used in new versions of Google Maps to further improve speed and display quality - on browsers that support it only, of course).

The UI seems to be a test run for the next office generation - they’ve remove the menu…

Oh, and it seems rather unlikely that IE will see such a big community with tons of extensions (you name it, someone already did it) like Firefox and Thunderbird do.

Still it likely is an improvement of the current IE versions, which fail to adhere to pretty much any standard. But it won’t be the big selling point for users to switch to Vista.