IE7 and Firefox 2.0 Released

On the heels of the supposedly new and improved Internet Explorer 7 is Firefox 2.0. And the sad news is, I’m not installing either one for awhile! At least not on my “production” computer.

IE7 supposedly features some new improvements. One of them is the tabbed interface. Another is some form of anti-phishing protection, which is helpful since running IE is like having a “kick me” sign taped to your back. I have not yet tried IE7, and probably won’t until I can get my testing computer returned to me, and install it there. It does have some improvements, but on the other hand, some elements of the user interface are reported to be moved into new positions compared to the older version. The new IE7 has also proven to render pages faster than IE6. Once I install it and test it, I’ll report back here and let everyone know my impressions of it. I guess that one could say that IE7 finally catches up to Firefox 1.0…

Does Firefox 2.0 fare any better? Sort of. Firefox 2.0 has a few neat features–it has a new tab option or two, including “close” buttons on each tab. It has a fantastic built-in spell checker that works right within textbox windows; right-clicking an underlined word brings up a context menu with word suggestions, and an option to add the word to the dictionary.

So, why did I uninstall it after 15 minutes? First of all, Mozilla still insists on making the search plugins and extensions installed on a per-user basis, not per-installation. So, if I want to give all users on my computer the same search plugins, I’d either have to install them in each users’ profile manually, or do what I do now: install them into the Program Files directory. Fortunately I had a backup of my existing search plugins, and loaded them all in that way. While the 2.0 plugins are all .xml files, apparently the .src files still work, since my old search plugins worked fine.

As for extensions, all but one were compatible with 2.0. Adblock Plus still worked, as did the User Agent Switcher and the IETab extension that lets you choose IE as a rendering engine for any particular tab that you want. The extension that failed was, unfortunately, an extension that fixed an extremely annoying problem with Firefox: the tiny search bar. I had installed some “chrome” coding that made it a specific size, but this extension added a resizeable “handle” you could move to resize the search bar. Very slick. It should have been built-in in the first place.

The deal killer for 2.0, though, was the loss of the keyboard shortcuts for web pages. In earlier versions, when your focus was on the content of the web page, you could use any of the ALT+ keyboard shortcuts to navigate the page. All popular forum software uses the shortcuts, and the web applications I write also use them extensively. The key is to make mousing as minimal a task as possible. With Firefox 2.0, the keyboard shortcuts are broken, and pressing ALT just returns focus to Firefox’s menu bar. Yes, that’s valid in Windows, but when the focus is on the actual web page content, this is incorrect behavior. Until Mozilla fixes this bug, I won’t be upgrading.

That’s the new browser situation in a nutshell. I’m hoping to test IE7 soon. I do need IE6 on my production computer to test out my development, but only because the majority of users still use IE6; when the balance tilts to IE7, I’ll make the switch. Firefox has been my daily browser for a couple of years, and I’m sticking with 1.5.0.7 until they fix 2.0 properly.