Yahoo is rolling out their own version of the IE7 beta, completely "optimized" for use with your Yahoo account. What does this mean?
# Yahoo! Search built into the browser
# Yahoo.com set as the default home page on the primary Tab
# Yahoo! Mail loads in your secondary Tab when you start IE7 Beta 2
# New, sleek design
# Safer web browsing
# View multiple web pages simultaneously
# Reduce clutter with Tabbed browsing
# Collect your favorite content from around the Web with RSS feeds
Download Internet Explorer (BETA 2) Optimized by Yahoo!
Basically it just means Yahoo took over all of the settings and adjusted the style of the site so it looks feels and acts like you're on yahoo all the time. While this might be compelling to people who want easily to have a browser that gives them all yahoo has to offer, a personally customized Firefox, Flock, or even IE will be more suitable to most people who hop from tool to tool across brands.
More significant, though, is the continued manouvering back and forth of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to form different alliegences. Google has the default to Firefox, which is the second largest browser in the US share of use wise. MSN Live will be the default for Microsoft, but they've also given Yahoo this in through a partnership. In addition, Microsoft and Yahoo are soon to announce that their chat applications are inter-operable (you can chat across carriers). Between Yahoo's customized IE and Yahoo's default on Flock, they are revving up their fight against Google for ownership of valuable search real estate. I wonder how much they had to pay Microsoft to grab priority from a company that has their own struggling search product to promote. Read below Microsoft's discussion of the release:
IEBlog : Yahoo! ships customized IE7 beta 2
Also, what will this mean long term when the final versions of IE7 roll out?
technorati tags:InternetExplorer, Firefox, Flock, Yahoo, Google, IE7, InternetExplorer7, Parternships, MSNLive, search
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