There’s no denying that I’m a staunch supporter of the Mozilla Firefox browser. In fact, you may have seen my name in the New York Times. But I’ll say it anyway: I’m not at all excited about the upcoming release of IE7.
Sure, I’m going to install it as soon as possible, check out the new interface, and see what’s different. But from everything I’ve read, there’s nothing new about this browser. Everything sounds like a repeat of something I’ve had in my browser for nearly a year now…
- Tabbed browsing: Zzzzzz…..
- Search tool bar: Zzzzz…..
- Simplified user interface: Zzzzz…..
- Web developer toolbar with DOM inspection: Zzzzz…..
- More security for Active X: Huh? Well it’s about time that Microsoft did something about that. We’ve only known for a few years that this is a problem.
- RSS feeds: Zzzz…. hhckk hhckk? Wait, maybe something interesting there.
Again, I have not checked out the new beta yet, but if RSS feeds are identified in IE7 in such a way that they are actually easy to subscribe to, then maybe IE has made some decent progress. The only native subscription to RSS feeds that I know of in Firefox are “live bookmarks”, which are incredibly inadequate. RSS is probably the most poorly implemented feature in Firefox. I have faith that this will improve.
The fact is, however, that these new features in IE7 are all goals that the creators of Firefox set out to accomplish in version 1.0. They did such a good job that they caused Microsoft to change direction midstream. IE7 was originally only going to ship with Vista, until the new OS became so delayed that there was no choice but to face the fact that Firefox was gaining precious ground in the marketplace.
Whatever. Maybe my biggest problem is that I’m going to have to listen to people in my office (who don’t know any better) go on and on in the coming months when IE7 is finally released about how great it is, when they’ve never even experienced these same features in Firefox. Inertia is a tragedy.
One parting thought, however. I was looking over the developer checklist for testing sites with the new browser. I found it funny that “Get the developer toolbar” came after the bullet point that discussed what to use the toolbar for. I would have thought it more appropriate for those to be reversed.
January 31, 2006
thanks for the feedback on the checklist. about the search box… please check out opensearch and some of our previous posts. I think it makes some new things possible esp with the 1.1 extensions. Also would love to get your feedback about how we did RSS. (Email is best) thanks!