Usability and the IE7 Beta 2 Beast

Ok now I like IE, and firefox and most new browsers, they all have features I like and all have their issues...

So today in my teams quarterly meeting we had a session on usability, web, application and just general stuff; the talk was really interesting and then it got me starting to wonder...

I cranked up the IE7 Beta 2 on my laptop as I reported on Wednesday and during the install you get a dialogue box pop up, lookin all nice and pretty, BUT it had some real usability issues:

The dialogue box for the install has one of those looping progress bars, at the start of the install, for quite a few minutes, the "progress text" remained static... was it doing anything, had it crashed...? I couldn't tell I had no contextual feedback..eventually the text changed and it was OK but I was a gnats-bits away from cancelling the instal...Oh yeh (usability issue 2) I couldn't cancel the instal 'cus there's no cancell button!

Come on guys, this is fairly crap usability... and for the "star of a new browsing experience" its not good for the average consumer...

I also have some concerns over the general User Experience; I think it will be great, but at the moment it isn't.. Basically I've had a hell of a busy last few days, I installed IE7 Beta2 ina brief interlude before things got hectic at work..now I'm busy and trying to do research on the web is a hell of a job when your trying to get your head around quite a different UX in your browser.. couldn't find my favourites for a few mins, keep forgetting where the home button is and although i'm used to tabbed browsing I keep trying to close tabs by clicking "x" on the right side of the tab bar...now its on the individual tabs...

So my point is, for a normal consumer, say a business guy or information worker! They're way too buy to worry about where all the new features are and how to access the groovy bits..so whats in it for themm..i'm not convinced theres anything, but I hope something will emerge..soon...

BTW, if anyone reading this knows how to take a set of tabs and make it the "default" tab collection so each time you fire-up the browser you can open up a set of site in one go (like you can with the Windows Live Toolbar) that would be appreciated...I miss that feature...