Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 (SP2)

[MsSparkie]

Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 (SP2)

[More like Firefox now????]

Review:
http://www.download.com/Internet-Exp...-10554966.html

[MaggieL]

IE Betas have Service Packs? That's pretty comical.

And I don't think Firefox requires spyware to get security patches. :-)

[MsSparkie]

I'm a firefox fan, don't use the tabs though, they get annoying, but love some of the extentions. Anyone use Opera, Safari(Mac), CrazyBrowser, Avant....doing multipage searches? I haven't used anything but Google for a long time...maybe time to look around again?

[mbpark]

I am running IE7 Beta 3 on a Windows Server 2003 VMWare instance at a customer site. I refuse to put that on a PC that I care about .

I use Safari on my Mac for multipage searches, which utilizes Google as its search engine. It's a very nice browser, and probably the best out there, IMHO, for general usage. Opera also has some very nice features (page scaling) that the other browsers just don't have.

However, for a PC, Firefox is still the best. Even though it has its memory leak issues, it still is the best for the PC for its plugin finder and other services.

[mbpark]

IE 7 Beta 3 - It's a decent browser, but I'll wait for our web designer to use it before passing judgment. Flash 9 works on it, and major sites come up, but the big change is going to be in High Assurance SSL certificates.

In other words, another way for Verisign to charge you out the ying-yang.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by mbpark

Even though it has its memory leak issues, it still is the best for the PC for its plugin finder and other services.

I remain unconvinced that FF itself has serious memory leaks. What it *does* have is memory management that as shipped is tuned to favor tab-switching and forward-back nav perfomance over memory footprint. There are several configuration tweaks to change that.

The Flash plugin had severe memory leaks at one point; I think they've been fixed.

Concur with your comments about the extensions and multi-engine search stuff. Tab Mix Plus, Context Search, Search Engine Ordering and AdBlock are must-haves also. If you do significant JavaScript work then check out FireBug.

[Undertoad]

When I have FF issues, they always trace back to plugins that don't work right.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by Blake Ross interview on IE7

Q: I know you're asked frequently about Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's next Web browser. How much have you used the test version, and what do you think of it?

Ross: I've used it a little bit. The truth is that it actually looks pretty good. People don't expect me to say that; they expect me to say that it's terrible. They did exactly what we were expecting them to do, which was take a bunch of time and get IE7 up to feature parity with Firefox. I haven't seen any real innovation above and beyond what we delivered in Firefox. I think that it's a solid product, but I think that by the time it comes out, we're going to be another world ahead of them again, so I think it's kind of a step or two behind us.

Q: Microsoft essentially allowed Internet Explorer to go dormant for several years, until Firefox started coming along and chipping away at its market share. What do you think about that, and what does that say about the state of competition?

Ross: That makes me furious, to be completely honest with you. That, more than anything, is why we really had to start Firefox in the first place. People think that we started Firefox just to take down Microsoft, just to win some kind of competition. Why would we want to win? There's no money involved for us. There's no (initial public offering) for this company; it's a non-profit. Why would we want to do this unless there's a real need?

The truth is I think Microsoft is very directly responsible for spyware and adware and the pop-up ads in general that proliferated across the Web after they abandoned their product. I mean, this is the world's most-used software application ever ... and I just think it's irresponsible for a company to abandon it simply because they can't find a financial incentive to continue development on it.

People ask me, "Well, gee, if IE7 is starting to catch up to Firefox, and if they've got their hand back in development right now, and eventually they might actually catch up to Firefox in terms of features, what's the benefit of using Firefox? Why are you guys still around if you say that your only goal is just to make the Web a better place?"

My answer to that is, how much can you really trust a company that five years ago completely left you abandoned? If they do, in fact, succeed in taking back some of the market share that Firefox has gotten back from them, who's to say that they're not going to disappear again? My issue is not so much at a product level; it's at a company level. How do you trust a company that left everyone out in the cold for five years?

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine...oftware03.html