T1B

Microsoft just released a beta version of IE7 today. Just downloaded it working O.K. so far. One cool feature I like and I don't know if firefox does this because i haven't used it in a while is a quick tabs button where it displays all the sites you have open in tabs on 1 page. Here's a pic You can check it out for yourself here http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7 ... irect.mspx

Yeah, you can do that with an extension called foXpose. Another extention, tab preview, displays a thumbnail of the page when you hover over a tab.

IE 7 doesn't seem to introduce anything new. It just basically takes Mozilla and other ideas that have become standard in the industry and finally adds them to its browser. I guess its easy to be on top and giving away your browser for nothing when you don't actually do any innovation. Oh wait, I guess the speed with which IE allows your computer to be infected with spyware and viruses is specific to IE and probably seen as a Feature by MS and antivirus/spyware companies.

I have to admit, I've been having a ton of memory problems with Firefox 1.5.01 lately. I will have to give IE7 beta a try.

Looks good, but I've been unable to turn off anti-aliasing fonts...despite unchecking "use clearType".

scratch that - after a restart, clearType was off.

One thing that IE will never be able to offer is extensions - I make heavy use of mine.

Well, thumbs up so far. I have to frequently use IE for testing sites, because most people use it. When IE is improved at any point, my life gets better.

For personal browsing, I'll stick with Firefox, even though the memory leak is a pain in the ass for the time being.

Would you ever consider Opera?

It's a free tab-based browser with no ad banners.
It's my second choice after Firefox only because Firefox has way more extensions,
but it's pretty good none the less.

I was going to quote someone from another list I'm on who said my problem with IE with a bit more clarity and good points. I haven't used Opera in a while, but it has always been a great browser as far as I can remember back. Back in the Dial up days, they made it so streamlined that it could browse the web way faster then IE or Netscape. I think a lot of that optimization/way of thinking has continued to be included in opera. Besides you can't go wrong with a browser that Microsoft and MSN tried to beat by specifically making up fake 'broken' webpages that would be served when you went to the MSN website and your browser identified itself as Opera. Oddly enough, if you changed what Browser it reported to the websites, the pages loaded correctly.