I’ve been a regular user of Mozilla Firefox in the last two years, for the reasons most do the switch, and in that period I hardly used Internet Explorer (usually just for professional reasons). So I was rather curious to see how the new preview of Internet Explorer 7 (Beta 2) was looking.
After the download and “validation tool” procedures I finally got to put my hands on it, and it surely looks a lot like Firefox and others: tabbed browsing and RSS feed support, just to name a few features. Looks like the guys at Redmond really knew what they where aiming for, and that’s not completely bad, if something works there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. But there was place for some improvement in things like the Quick Tabs (that shows all the opened tabs in thumbnails) or the strange choice of hiding the menu bar, which is not that strange as the menu bar is hardly used in a browser. But one thing’s missing from Firefox, and it’s an important one, the Find As You Type feature.
It’s nice to see Microsoft taking a new approach in their new applications, like this one or the Windows Live, instead of the visually bloated things we were used to we now have simple and clean interfaces, I guess it’s the Firefox and Google effect
But for me IE, like most Microsoft apps, has kind of a closed box approach, sure you can add plugins (usually ActiveX controls… :S), toolbars and alike, but the product’s boundary always were very contained and with little space for further modification. This is not the case of Firefox, where the creation of additional modules is supported, and encouraged, allowing to easily customize the browser to suit each one’s needs. And this I don’t think will change with the final release of IE7
Overall I’m quite surprised with the new IE, but for now I’ll stick with Firefox as I still don’t feel the need to switch back.
Technorati Tags: Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Mozilla
