Arriving long after it was initially promised, and some five years after Internet Explorer 6 first saw light, Microsoft has a lot resting on IE7, and the most to lose.

Over the past two years, Firefox has eaten up 5-10 percent (depending on whose statistics you opt for) of the browser market, and while Internet Explorer still retains over 80 percent of what's left, it does appear to be on a downward spiral. So will IE7 reverse that? Maybe, maybe not. But it is an improvement over the last version, as you'd hope and expect.

A lot of the changes are to do with catching up. For instance, tabbed browsing - which Firefox users have been taking for granted - has been integrated into Internet Explorer for the first time, and it's far easier and more convenient to have several tabbed pages within one browser window than an open page for every site you're concurrently looking at.

Furthermore, the interface has been streamlined and smartened, and while that means a little reacquainting is required for long-time IE users, it does de-clutter the screen a little. Proper RSS support is built-in, too.

But Internet Explorer 7 is more than just catch-up, and it has a few tricks of its own up its sleeves: the phishing filter for one. This slows your browsing down a minute amount, as it now cross-checks pages you're visiting against a list of known phishing sites that Microsoft maintains. It's a welcome security feature and it scores a point over Firefox and Opera in that regard. We also warmed to the font smoothing, and while we didn't have much problem reading Web sites with IE6, it does undoubtedly make them a little clearer.

There are, however, inherent problems to IE being developed by Microsoft. While you end up with an all-singing, all-dancing release every few years, it's clearly less organic than its open source alternatives, and while those who like their Web browser to do what it's told and are never tempted to tinker with it won't mind that too much, there's not a good feature in IE7 that Firefox won't be able to match within months (at the very most), simply because of the way it's developed.

Internet Explorer is incapable, by design, of progressing fast enough. Some people are also not going to appreciate the fact that Microsoft is delivering the product via Windows Update, which should entertain those with broadband caps no end.

Our main quarrel, though, was over stability. Granted, it's the early days of the product's life, but we'd have hoped that given the prolonged development period it enjoyed, irritants such as a Flash plug-in constantly crashing the browser would have long since been ironed out.

But still, it is a very good Web browser, and no amount of negative press should blind people to that. Granted, it won't be long before some sort of security problem emerges that Microsoft has to patch, as the company's products seem a magnet for such issues (and there's plenty of debate over the whys and wherefores of that).

And you'd struggle to appreciate that this is a product that's been in development for so long. Yet you won't find a better closed-source browser anywhere, and Internet Explorer 7 does have a lot going for it.