Microsoft said Thursday morning that it had made available the third beta of Internet Explorer 7, the final beta before the browser ships later this year ahead of Windows Vista. Microsoft said that while the second beta was "feature complete," Beta 3 does include some enhancements.

"Throughout the development of Internet Explorer 7 Microsoft has encouraged and listened to customer feedback," a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews. "As a result of customer feedback, IE7 Beta 3 contains some feature changes in addition to the planned reliability, compatibility and security improvements."

Improvements have also been made to the RSS features of the browser, allowing for on-demand updating of RSS feeds and "mark all as read" functionality.

Testing from Beta 2 has resulted in better compatibility with Web sites and Web applications, and several rendering bugs have been fixed, Microsoft said. Additionally, the has implemented all security fixes into IE 7 that were released with this month's Patch Tuesday release.

IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch said that the next steps for Internet Explorer include the Release Candidates which likely will appear over the summer, followed by the official release in the second half of the year.

"I'm looking forward to reading the feedback - positive and negative - as it comes in," he said.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 can be downloaded from FileForum.