IE 7 includes a number of new features however I believe this release will do more to send people over to FireFox then it will to bring people from Firefox back to IE.

RSS Features

IE 7 adds a number of RSS features that may be of interest to users who have never used RSS. The features are very basic and provide little advantage over traditional favorites.
The RSS icon on the mini-toolbar lights up when an RSS feed is available.
Clicking on the RSS icon allows you to view the feed within the browser.
The browser/reader view allows basic searching and filtering functions. These functions are often less then what many web-logs already have built in.
IE can then track the RSS feed telling you when new content is available.
OK, it doesn’t actually tell you. You have to open the secret unlabeled star drop-down, navigate to the Feeds section and then realize that bolded items are new content.
One nice thing about these RSS feeds is that they can be read offline. So if you’re traveling with a laptop it does make it easier to bring some reading material along for the ride. It’s also possible to download enclosure documents such as podcasts, although doing so is not an obvious setting.
Overall I’m not impressed. Although it’s good that IE is adding support for RSS this reader lacks many features that would make it a viable newsreader. As a comparison the Outlook-express newsreader that was built in ‘98 and pretty much abandoned since has many more features for reading and aggregating news feeds. An update version of the news-reader with RSS support would have leveraged existing technologies and provided a lot more features. The RSS support in IE7 is much less then what is provided on RSS websites like bloglines, yahoo, google newsreader and others.

Under the hood

The new version of IE has added a number of features that are under the hood helping the browsing experience. These include improved rendering of CSS, clear type, RSS infrastructure, security filters, international support and more. These improvements are unlikely to be seen or understood by the average user of IE 7.

Cleartype support will make online text look better.
The phishing security filter is a good thing although it’s currently hard-wired to Microsoft server to determine the trust and quality of a site. It would have been good to leave this open so Symantec, Norton, CyberNanny and others could add value in this space. The response time of the filter is pretty slow and it seems to be done after the page has loaded. This may pose a security risk as the potentially bad site has a window of opportunity.
Improved CSS support, PNG support and other standards are a good thing. It’s likely that every round of browser updates will introduce a new set of issues and workarounds but the hope is that these workaround continue to get smaller and smaller. Initial testing shows that most sites work without a problem although more complex sites that rely on HTML editing such as blogger.com do have problems with the new browser.
Overall: 3 out of 5

Interface 3/5 – I think overall it’s not as good or as flexible as IE 6 or Firefox 1.5. I think the menus and toolbar interactions are odd and the smaller buttons will make the core browser a little awkward to use and to get used to. The added support for tabbing is nice but falls short of innovative or spectacular.
CSS Support – 3/5 – A lot better then it was and definitely on it’s way. The acid test2 is still pretty far from where it’s supposed to be. This test is becoming the yard stick for how browser CSS is judged and IE has already stated that they don't expect that they will pass the test.
RSS Reader – 2/5 – IE has a base level of what you could do for RSS. Anyone familiar with RSS will likely continue using their current reader. This may engage some new users but the design doesn’t have much advantage over favorites. To be fair Firefox is also equally lacking in the RSS reader department.
Printing – 4/5 – Much improved and offering all the base features that users will look for.
Security – 3/5 – The new security filter is a good thing but the information bar introduced in XP SP2 will still confuse and get in peoples way as they try to download legitimate files. It's not clear to me that browsing with IE is more or less secure then with any other browser.