Rob Eberhardt

Observations as a user:

• Address bar: I'm not sure I like it being locked to the title bar.  Any other toolbars go below -- that's weird.  Interestingly, I can drag the whole window from the chrome near it, so I think it may actually be part of the titlebar under the hood.
• "Star"/start menu: Opens the sidebar containing Faves, History, and Feeds. I think I like this, an idea borrowed from live.com.  It'll still take some getting used to, tho.
• bug?: Backspacing/deleting characters in this MSHTML-enabled (contenteditable) area of .Text doesn't work right.  Possibly machine-specific, but I haven't noticed it before.
• Tabs: I reeeally want to move the tabs to the bottom of the screen, as I do with Firefox (and like Excel worksheets).  I also want to be able to double-click to close tabs, but I'm happy that middle-clicks are “Open in a New Tab”.
• New tab thing: The small “blank tab” for creating new tabs is Mystery Meat, and especially confusing since there's a “plus” icon nearby.  I know MS is going for “uncluttered UI”, but this breaks usability in favor of pretty.  Just show a #8220;new document” icon the whole time, and it'll be much clearer. 
• Stop loading icon: The “X” icon also very confusing.  “X” means Delete, a “Stop Sign” icon means stop. 
• Reload icon: OTOH, I like the color reversal here, the green in the background makes it stand out more.
• Faster: address bar responsiveness.
• Slow, like rendering of the new Quick Tabs, Classic toolbar and Google's toolbar.

Observations as a developer:

• CSS Visual Transitions: are these gone?!?  Strange, b/c CSS Visual Filters still work.
• Modal/Modeless dialogs: IE6sp2 forced the status bar onto these.  IE7 now forces an address bar too, creating problems for web apps with sized dialogs.  Slowly but surely those dialogs are becoming just windows, EXCEPT that...
• Modal/Modeless dialogs are still very buggy in IE7b2!
• SELECT elements: As expected, much better now!