Microsoft certainly has made some much-needed improvements in IE 7 — at least, as indicated in the preview of the beta version.
But Opera has been doing all of that for some time, and generally does all of the things shown in the beta better than the preview suggests IE will do them. For example: IE 7 can delete your entire browsing history in a keystroke. But what if you don’t want to delete ALL of your cookies? Or would like to retain your typed-in URLs while deleting the sites-visited history? Opera permits the user to be quite selective in this area.