W-W-Wel-Welcome the new new browser wars, same as the old browser wars. Well, maybe things have changed a bit-t-t-t.
(I'm rereading the intro and wondering if anyone will get it... oh well, to late now to fix it)
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 is now out for download, and FireFox 2.0 is out of the street as well. I've been using both of these back and forth for a week now, and because it's my blog I'm going to tell you what I think.
First up, the look. FF2 is pretty much the same look and feel as before; a few changes here and there and a different "tone" but it's still on the same channel. IE7 on the other hand has been completely overhauled. You can tell that the design is "borrowed" from FireFox, Opera, and Safari, but ignoring the copy-cattery it looks pretty sweet. Buttons are not in the normal place and I think overall a better use of screen space. If you are on a "cramped" monitor or laptop screen, you'll enjoy the extra elbow room. Many of the windows also pop out in neat and interesting ways, such as the "star" button on the left that hold bookmarks, feeds, and history. I'm going to give the nod here to IE7 for looks and interface.
I'll make quick statement here to say IE7 is no longer the bastard of standards compliance IE6 was. That alone makes me glad that users will be automatically upgraded soon to IE7.
Next up, features. Both FF2 and IE7 have a search built-in - this is nothing new for FF users and most IE users have a Google or Yahoo toolbar to add this widget. Both can be customized to use any engine you wish, and have multiple search engines in selectable drop down menus. FF pre-installs a set of engines for you, IE takes you to a page on the first run that allows you to select the engines you want, so some kudos to IE for user choice. I never had to replace MSN with Google, I just selected Google from the start. FF has an additional feature over IE, the search box taps into Google Suggest; this is cool but I was disappointed that FF didn't inform the user this was taking place by default and inform them of the privacy issues involved. I call a tie here.
Both browsers have finally caught up to useful RSS newsreaders, and both seem pretty nice. Neither has support for loading your RSS feeds from an online service, so your feeds are only on the machine you load them on. This makes the both useless for me as I prefer to access my email and news from any computer, any where. FF does support directing the saving of an RSS feed to a service, such as Bloglines - IE7 supports this as well with a addin from Bloglines. Both allow previewing a feed before subscribing - an addition I welcome. Again this is a tie.
Okay, here is one for FF - built in spellcheck. The spellcheck works inline (little red dots under misspelled words) and it's enabled automatically for large fields. IE7 supports extensions now, so I went looking for a spell checker and the picking are slim (and not all of them free). FF wins this one, and for me (who con't spel wret a dam) is a big win.
Speaking of extensions, it's interesting to see IE7 supporting them. I doubt we'll see as many extensions for IE as we do FF but I'm glad it's there. Also both share tabbed browsing and anti-phishing, making the distinction between the two even less. So, um... tie?
In the end, FF spell check will win me. That's a pretty weak hold, and shows just how stagnant FF has become in terms of feature set. Honestly, once a user is upgraded to IE7 I can't see a reason to tell them to use FF2 instead. With Microsoft back in the fight, FireFox and the others are going to have to do more than just build a good basic browser if they want to continue to gain market share. I think the true next generation browsers will come from ideas like Flock with integrated social services and blogging tools, breaking down the line of browsers and web pages into one seamless experience.
Flock will need spell checking and remote RSS feed services first. Just a heads up, in case anyone who works at Flock happens to read this blog.
Posted By Mike On Thursday, October 26, 2006
Filed under ie firefox review |
Comments (4)
Perry
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Thursday, October 26, 2006
2:22:15 AM
Nice, and much more extensive review than mine. I agree that IE7 and FF2 are pretty much the same. I hadn't yet seen the FF spell check, but I'll check it out.
I look forward to the new version of Flock, based on FF2 as it will surely be. I find that FF2 is far faster than Flock, so for the moment it has won my heart. We'll just have to wait and see who "takes me home" after the dance.
Perry
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Thursday, October 26, 2006
2:25:05 AM
Oh, by the way, please tell me what is the basic feed for your site. I tried mashups but that doesn't seem to be it.
Mike
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Thursday, October 26, 2006
3:34:07 AM
Mashup is Records (blog posts) + Del.icio.us, which is the homepage content. If you don't want the del.icio.us mini blogs, Records is what you want. I plan to rework the feeds and allow users to select the content they want in the near future, but that's more than 20 minutes away. Photos (flickr) and comments are on their own at the moment.
Daryl
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Thursday, October 26, 2006
4:31:47 AM
As Perry notes, the next big release of Flock is built on FF2 and so will reap a lot of the benefits of MoCo's hard work. It'll probably be slower b/c there's just butt-loads more stuff going on in the background than in vanilla FF2 (and much more than current releases of Flock have going on). It's in the pending release that our product becomes more like the social browser we've been calling it since the beginning. Flock will have poor man's remote RSS by virtue of the fact that it supports Firefox extensions, and there's a Bloglines extension. I don't know what other changes may have been made to the feed reader beyond performance enhancements. Enough pimping Flock, though.
As for Firefox vs. IE7, I've read opinions that at least in the fairly short term, those who stick with Firefox will do so because they prefer to support its open culture rather than supporting Microsoft. That's probably pretty accurate. Lots of people are fanatical about Firefox because of its genesis story and open culture who might otherwise be perfectly happy using a commercial browser with feature parity, as IE7 appears more or less to have.
