Unfortunately I must express my disappointment in IE7, not for any of its bells or whistles, but for its basic surfing capability.   Imagine my dismay whence I endeavored to load up the latest pearls of wisdom from the venerable sage himself, Greg Hartnett, and I received the lovely error "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage".  Works in IE6 on other PC's.  Worked in IE6 on this PC before the upgrade.  Works in Firefox, regardless of where.

So I submitted a bug report, having had the last release candidate installed, like a good citizen.   After signing in on the Microsoft IE Feedback site to give feedback, I couldn't help but notice the smattering of reports of the same.  While the condition was intermittent for some, its definitely repeatable for me.  The site loads all the way and then wham, the error appears.  Weird, right?  Maybe its a plugin or video he's got on his homepage.

Regardless, I just noticed in the IE FAQ, that there is a tool called the User Agent String Utility to let you emulate IE6 for sites that don't load. 

Q. My favorite websites don't load correctly, or don't seem to work at all in Internet Explorer 7. What should I do?

A. If you encounter a site which does not recognize Internet Explorer 7, a new tool known as the User Agent String Utility has been created to help you work around the problem. The utility comes in the form of a small executable that opens an Internet Explorer 7 instance that emulates Internet Explorer 6 by sending the Internet Explorer 6 user agent string. It also provides a mechanism for you to report problem web sites to Microsoft so that we can follow up with the affected site owners. Download the tool here.

You would think, with this being such the huge issue that it is, that they would bake this right into IE7.  In fact, dare I go so far as to suggest they could retry the http attempt with the IE6 user agent string in the event the above error is encountered.  Might affect the site's stats a bit, but that's not the user's problem now is it?  What did poor greg do to deserve the 89% of web surfers who will may soon be unable to access his site after they upgrade from IE6?

So yes, I just installed Firefox 2.0 release candidate and it loads up his site fine.  No old user agent string emulator tool to install or anything.  Of course I haven't been using it long enough to know if it needs such a tool or not, but as skeptical as I tend to be about firefox (that's another rant entirely), I'm sure glad I have an alternative at present for those sites that don't load in IE7.