New Beta software

IE7 Beta2
Microsoft has released its beta+2+preview all in one offering. The interface looks slick but tabbed browsing in IE needs a bit of getting used to. It crashed for me within 30 minutes of use (not abuse - just browsing) - but has worked quite well since (used it for a ~ a day).
There are a number of new features that hopefully will make browsing more secure and pleasant.

At first glance it appears to have the same CSS rendering engine (hence problems) as the previous version - but I expect that to be sorted in the final version.

IE blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/


Google Toolbar 4 (for IE) Beta
Matt Cutts goes into detail how one can create a button to select a url and run a whois query on it, all without heavy coding. There's an autotype function that might bug people, and a bookmarking function that some people may not feel comfortable with, but probably others may find pretty helpful.

Probably the most important aspect of this toolbar is that it reinforces user stickiness by encouraging users to sign in with Google in order to access functions such as gmail or bookmarks. Keeping people on Google has always been an issue, as mindshare has imo been the traditional source of visitors. This toolbar appears to me as a kind of mortar to help keep the pieces together, like a software as service application or a virtual desktop- or at least that's the direction it seems to be taking.

You can try it out from:
http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/T4/