Over on Digg there's a link to a supposed copy of IE 7... Er, I'm sorry, Windows Internet Explorer 7. Most of the folks in the comments were totally afraid to install it. Not without good reason, as it's a  rar file, doesn't have the "new" title in there, and the logo is different. Oooh, scary! Being the brave yet stupid installer that I am (and armed with antivirus out the wazoo), I went ahead and tried it out.

At first I was a little worried. After a simple install my machine rebooted and the C drive ran chkdsk. Ulp. After a successful boot and some ominous settings and registry changes though— it ran pretty well. Upon first launching there's a new warning to make sure you want IE checking all the sites you travel to, attempting to limit phishing scams. All the stuff you've heard about is there: tabbed browsing, the little search (MSN default, you can choose others) window, etc. The URL bar is now above the textual menus, which I thought was kind of odd. Google Toolbar, which had been on my IE 6 install seemed to work fine. The logo (under the Help menu) still didn't look right, as it was sans yellow swoosh.

In the final analysis this was probably nothing more than some quasi-legal release on the part of soft32. Makes me wonder if this was intentional or not...

[via Digg]