The first private betas of Micrsoft’s next OS (Windows Vista) have been issued, which also contain Internet Explorer v7. Testers have noted how Internet Explorer (IE) 7 appears to disable both Google and Yahoo!'s toolbars.

It's speculated that the reasoning behind this has a lot of do with 'compatibility testing', indeed Yahoo!'s latest release DOES appear to work.

The good news is that IE7 DOES include both tabbed-browsing and new "anti-phishing" features, along with other enhancements. However we're not convinced that Microsoft has spent enough time, if any, improving HTML rending speed.

IE7 is expected to be released long before Windows Vista and most likely before the end of this year (public beta shouldn't be far off). We'll be interested to see if it can stand up to Firefox.