IE 7 beta 3 for XP hit the wires today. This version isn’t a great leap forward from the last, but rather a measured step towards the final release planned towards the end of the year. This upgrade is only for the Windows XP version.

Microsoft says the last beta version was basically feature complete, so the changes in beta 3 are mostly polish and bug fixes. There are a few small but useful new features, though. You can now move tabs around, for one thing. And you’ll get a horizontal scroll bar when you zoom in on a page and it consequently doesn’t all fit on the screen.

There are a couple of minor RSS tweaks, also. You can choose to refresh all your feeds at once manually, and you can globally mark everything as read.

One thing gave me pause when I talked with a Microsoft spokesman last week. He said that about half of a batch of recently patched vulnerabilities in IE 6 carried over to IE 7. To be fair, he said a number of them were found during code analysis for IE 7, and it is normal to keep a large amount of code from previous versions when writing software upgrades.

But I’m still troubled, since a crucial element of IE 7 is supposed to be improved security. If IE 7 has even half the critical security holes of its aging predecessor, it will be one insecure app.

Still, there’s no downside to grabbing Beta 3 if you’ve been using Beta 2. Except maybe that you’ll need to take the slightly tedious step of manually uninstalling Beta 2 first. Microsoft says they are working on having the next install take care of the uninstall so that it will be a one-step process.

Speaking of the next upgrade, there will be at least one more before the final version. Look for an RC (release candidate) version around September.