Brian's Blog

Last night I installed Internet Explorer Beta 2 Preview on my Windows XP partition. After 5 minutes or so of install and a reboot I loaded it up and found it looks very much like Firefox. It even has the search bar in the upper right just like Firefox, except that it points to MSN as your search instead of Google. Of course, tabbed browsing is there as we've all heard would be. It even uses the same short cut key of CTRL-T to open a new tab, just like Mozilla and Firefox. One thing I did noticed though was the Quick Tabs feature, which shows a thumbnail view every tab you have open allowing you to visually choose which one to go to. I at first thought this was a unique thing that Microsoft added that Firefox couldn't do. Then I found Firefox Showcase which is an extension to Firefox that does the exact same thing. IE7 finally has some anti-phishing stuff built in which is nice for the gullible average user. But that isn't even unique as Firefox also has extensions to deal with that such as SpoofStick.

I must admit though, I like the IE7 way of dealing with RSS better than the default Firefox way. When you subscribe to a feed it gets added to your favorites in the feeds category. When you choose a feed it gets presented to you in a nice, easy to read web page rather than the annoying pop out menus that you get from Firefox. If Firefox did RSS in a similar way I may actually stop using Bloglines. I need to research more on RSS related extensions for Firefox.

The pop up blocker seems adequate in IE7, though to be fair only 24 hours or so of using it probably isn't a good test. Though I find it hard to believe that anything that Microsoft can come up with would be better than Adblock Plus plus the Adblock Filterset.G Updater. That combination of plugins not only stops 99.9% of the pop ups but removes banner adds and other annoying things.

My first impression with this preview is that Microsoft is simply playing catch up. I don't really see anything that is new or can't be easily done via Firefox extensions. I'm guessing though that the average Joe will now be more inclined to just use IE 7 since it has pretty much the same features and comes already installed (or will come already installed). IE 7 has more functions out of the box than Firefox too, which is good for the typical user. We can't expect the typical user that can't change their home page, or always clicks on the "Free Offers" to figure out how to install an extension even though it so easy a retarded monkey could do it.

I'm not giving up my Firefox any time soon. But I have to say in comparing IE6 with IE7 that it's a huge improvement. Even though the improvements just make it more like Firefox. Who knows though, maybe there are more improvements under the hood than I realize? Time will tell if IE7 remains the giant security hole that IE6 has been.