Internet Explorer (IE) 7 vs The Rest
Thursday, April 27th, 2006 | 12:04 am @ SK
After years of letting Internet Explorer 6 languish in non development, Microsoft has finally gotten the ball rolling with its successor, unveiling the second beta of IE7 to the public for testing.
I installed the IE7 and checked company’s webmail. The browser’s interface has not changed dramatically since the public preview. There is still the strange arrangement with the menu bar sandwiched in-between the address bar and the list of tabs. However, there are some minor changes, such as with the customizable search engine box.
Improvements to the new version primarily revolve around speed and stability. Beta 2 takes less memory than its predecessor and appears, at least at a cursory glance, to render pages slightly faster.
However, one thing for sure, destroy Internet Explorer campaign has just started. A group of Firefox advocates from Massachusetts is offering website publishers and bloggers $1 for each Internet Explorer visitor to their sites they can convince to switch to the Mozilla Firefox browser. Google has recently announced that it will pay websites $1 for each referred download of Firefox it receives via the Google Toolbar.
"Firefox is one of the most important software applications in the world because it can play a big part in determining the future of the web. It is crucial that an open-source, standards-based web browser becomes the most popular browser, and Firefox has a shot at being that. Google has just set the stage for Firefox to literally "take back the web" and go from 11% of browsers to over 50%. If people can now spread Firefox, stick it to Microsoft, and make money for each user switched, an aggressive strategy just got more appealing."
So is IE7 a legitimate contender to other Windows browsers like Firefox and Opera? Judging browsers is a very personal and subjective task, and I won’t attempt it here.
But, IE7 will remain on my laptop, solely for webmail checking purpose. Anything more than that, Firefox is still the favourite.
We all know the reason.
April 27th, 2006 at 12:10 am
"We all know the reason."
No, I don’t. Please enlighten me.
[SK] Previously, it was the pop up problem. Then, Firefox came into the picture and since then, I switched from IE to Firefox, no turning back. The tabbed-browsing, the perfect void of illegal operation alert, the speed, the simplistic are more than enough to hook me up with Firefox till now.
Or let’s be fair to IEs loyalists out there, it’s very much my own perception, doesn’t mind the fact that, IE is losing its market share to alternative browsers, a fact that people like you and I can observe from time to time.
April 27th, 2006 at 3:34 am
I don’t like Firefox and I guess I never shall. Its only on my desktop for web design purposes. But I still good old IE6 for my browsing needs.
- MENJ
April 27th, 2006 at 8:17 am
IE6 (and probably 7) will only be in my laptop (not in my Mac though!) to check webmail…
yes… webmail, coz my company is a victim stuck with M$ Outlook…
April 27th, 2006 at 9:35 am
"We all know the reason."
No, I don’t either.
Firefox is cool, with its extension model and such. However, Tab browsing is nothing to shout about, Netcaptor is the first that started it.
Needless to mention there is an inherent problem with Firefox engine - Memory Leak. They still suffer very bad with that. When you have 2 - 3 tabs loading pages with many images, then you will observe Firefox holding up > 300MB of RAM and whole system become less responsive. Of couse a system with a higher load of memory wouldn’t end up freezed so easily but the fact firefox memory leak problem is very serious shouldn’t be overlooked. And they can’t seem fix this unless they look into the core and have major rewrite which could potentially be another few years?
April 27th, 2006 at 10:09 am
1. Don’t understand why you need IE to read webmail. I use Firefox to do that without any problems.
2. David, are you using an old version of Firefox? I never noticed the slowdown etc you mentioned.
Thanks in advance for your kind responses to come :-)
[SK] I need to use IE to read webmail as I need to assign my emails into separate folders.
April 27th, 2006 at 10:38 am
I need to use Internuts Exploder (IE) to read my webmail, coz M$ made its outlook web version look darned pathetic and less functional when I used Firefox… grrrr….
April 27th, 2006 at 10:44 am
ROFL! I think IE will still be around no matter what because we still have imbeciles around developing websites only compatible with MS IE.
For instance, if you read the Tech&U of NST today the writer noted for the e-Filing is only currently compatible with IE. Ha ha ha ha..
So the death of IE in Malaysia is not even close at the moment. :P
April 27th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
"We all know the reason."
can be expanded to
"We all know what Microsoft did to dominate the web browser market.", ok not everyone knows, and Netscape at that time only gave a whimper of challenge anyway.
Memory leaks? Yes Firefox still have bugs(less annoying bugs than IE 6 IMO), but backed with the open source movement, I can have hope that the browser will be better and better.
Can I have the same hope with IE? Me thinks that if not for the challenge posed by firefox, Microsoft woudln’t even bother to improve its browser.
May 1st, 2006 at 10:32 pm
I have been using Firefox ever since due to the functionality and the extensions. I have hope for Firefox as the updates and the open source movement is pretty impressive.
What will Microsoft do? Launch IE 7 and let us wait for another 5 yrs before they have any updates?