IE7

I installed Internet Explorer version 7 beta 2.

I have been using Foxfire since version 1.0 and I love it but there are things I love about IE7 more.

First of all, tabs are great and IE7 does it better than Foxfire.

A new tab will open to the ...
IE7: right of the current tab
FF: far right of the browser (inconvenient)

To close the current tab I click an X located ...
IE7: on the current tab
FF: on the far right of the browser (inconvenient)

When I get too many tabs open ...
IE7: they scroll left and right
FF: they off screen and I cannot access them

IE7 has a thumb view of each tab and a drop-down menu for my tabs. FF does not. I can close tabs from the thumb view.

I still cannot re-arrange tabs and when an audio or video starts playing in a tab I still have no idea which tab it's coming from.

1 GB of RAM was plenty but lately I've started to need more. I open up so many tabs that I run out of memory and I can no longer open things. I can seriously see myself having 100+ tabs open at the same time.

I still open multiple browsers to keep my tabs organized by type for example work tabs and fun tabs and there are pages like my gmail that I don't like to go hunting for so I keep them in a browser with no other tabs.

If I visit link sites like metafilter or memempool I will open them up in their own browser because I will quickly create 20 or 30 tabs just from one site.

IE7 seems to display fonts more clearly than FF but IE7 is slow to open and beta 2 is a little buggy but that's to be expected. I like it's shiny glass buttons and tabs. Everything is smaller. I remember in the early days with Mosaic and Netscape 4 and IE 3 and 4 the buttons were HUGE! Actually I had a hard-time finding the Stop and Refresh buttons on IE7 because they're so small and moved out of the way. I thought for a few days it didn't have those buttons.

I'm forcing myself to use IE7 now. For a few days I was only using FF to access my favorites but I finally exported them and imported them into IE7 so lately I've had no reason to use FF.

Conclusion: I think Microsoft has succeeded in leap frogging the competition evolving the browser to a whole new level. I just found a new favorite browser.