I’ve been pretty enthusiastic about IE7 since it came out. It seems faster, has tabs, and handles most websites pretty well.
Recently, I’ve come to have a more negative view. Some of it is related to IE7’s UI quirks, some of it is just performance. Specifically:

  • There’s not enough room for tabs (the bookmark buttons as well as the other buttons on there right just take room away)
  • It never remembers the layout of the toolbar add-ons correctly. This is particularly irritating with 3+ toolbars.
  • It’s slower than Firefox on the same machine
  • It temporarily freezes a lot (probably a few times a day, for a good 30 seconds or so. reason unknown, and this is on a machine with tons of memory that’s not doing much else)
  • Occasionally crashes. More than Firefox.

I’m also not convinced that memory usage with IE7 is much better. That was one of the original reasons I switched to it from FF 1.5, but 2.0 seems ok, and on a machine with 2GB, it just doesn’t matter that much.
Anyhow, the last straw was when it froze while I was taking my online traffic school test. Right in the middle of it. No fancy Javascript. No nothing. I had to kill it and restart my test.
The only real downside of going back to FF is that now I get the crappy version of the Outlook OWA interface again.

2 comments

  1. Reply

    Try using the IEtab plugin. It doesn’t use IE completely, just the engine for certain tabs, and allows you to use IE only when you want. I use it for outlook OWA myself :). good hunting

  2. Ken

    Reply

    Yea, I’ve actually been using IETab, and I like it quite a lot.
    It has a few integration issues though.. like it can’t tell Firefox about the different kinds of popups. For example, the OWA message composition window comes up as a full screen tab, when I would like it to be a normal separate window that isn’t quite so big.
    I’m not sure if that’s even possible to get right though.

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