Slow. The thing is a total dog when it comes time to render a page. My own piddly little website takes a long while to fully view because there's a dramatic pause between host resolution and the start of rendering. Bleh!
Ugly. The new interface to it is horrible. I'm sorry, but the menu belongs at the top of the window, not below some toolbars. The UI constantly monkeys with my expectations of whether UI elements are to be located. My muscle memory hates you IE 7. Hates. You.
Rendermonkey. It has a harder time rendering pages than IE 6, and to make matters worse, that's on Microsoft's own documentation pages. I can't count how many times I'd have to hit refresh to get their screwy content to display properly in IE 7, and even then there would be visual issues. I especially enjoyed getting to a page that would never finish loading (one element would cause another one to load and they got into a loop).
Searchless. It has a search bar, just like FireFox does. Yippee! It defaults (and AFAIK, only allows) MSN search. Nevermind. That's a worthless feature. One thing I love about FireFox is the fact that I can change the search page. So I can search Google, or Amazon if I'm looking for a book, or Dictionary.com if I need to check the spelling of something, or MSDN if I need to find an API.
Buggy. I just lost an entire blog posting that I was writing simply because I opened a new tab and tried to use the MSN search bar.
I think I'll just stick with FireFox, even on Vista. IE 7 is just way too little, way too late for my tastes. They get an E for effort, but a C for crap.
Don't hold back! Tell us how you really feel! :P LOL
After looking at even the screenshots for IE, my first thought was "I'm not going to have to use that, am I?". Yeah. Can't say I'm impressed with Microsoft. At times it seems they are only half-listening to watch customers are saying. Seems for every one thing they get right, they get ten things wrong.
I'm not sure about the Vista build, but in IE7 Beta1 for WinXPSP2, the search bar has MSN, Google, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo. You can set the default to any of them. You can add new search engines as well. Also, remember it is Beta1 :P
That's one thing I'm very surprised Safari doesn't have yet: Other places to search using the search toolbar item. Amazon, Wikipedia, Dictionary/Thesaraus.com, eBay... So many good sites to put there, but it's still only Google.
Actually, the one feature that I see IE7 is supposed to have is that if the webpage won't fit across the page when printing, it is supposed to automagically resize it to fit. I can't stand when I have to switch to landscape just to print a webpage. :)