Tech-savvy readers may have heard that major upgrades of everyone's favorite Web browsers - Internet Explorer and Firefox - both came out this month. Actually, it's unlikely that Firefox users - who took the trouble to install the competing browser in the first place - are unaware of the upgrade from FF 1.5.1 to 2.0. But Internet Explorer users, who are less involved in tech doings than their Firefox brethren, may have missed news about the upgrade to IE7. They'll find out soon enough, though, as MS includes the final update of the newly released Internet Explorer 7 as part of Windows Updates, in a sort of "forced upgrade," due in a couple of weeks.

 

It's clear that Microsoft worked very hard on this upgrade, adding many features that Firefox users have enjoyed for years - to the point where both programs offer pretty much the same thing now. The biggest change awaiting IE users is tabbed browsing, long a part of FF's bag of tricks; instead of opening a new window to surf multiple sites, as Internet Explorer 6.x users did, new sites can be opened in a tab in the same IE7 window. Lots of people find this system of switching between loaded sites more convenient, and tabbing has become a cause celebre among dissatisfied IE users. But convenience is where it begins and ends for tabs. Many of those who switched from IE to FF way back when expected to see improvements in memory usage, because of course one window, even loaded with tabs, will take up less memory than multiple windows! Needless to say, as FF users subsequently discovered, it didn't work out that way.

 

 

 

Among the major improvements touted by both, IE and FF also feature automatic "phishing" protection, to help you avoid surfing to sites intent on illicitly separating you from your money. When you surf to a suspicious site (the list comes from a number of Web sources, including Google, and is updated constantly), both IE and FF try to block access to the site. I actually preferred Firefox's version of the tool, because it lets you see what you're being prevented from linking to - while IE won't let you see the page at all. Considering that most phishing sites are accessed from e-mail that people have no business opening in the first place (“Your Paypal account has been suspended!”), browser phishing protection is a good thing to have around, but it shouldn't be considered a first line of defense. You can check out how well both filters work by clicking on one of the links at http://www.dslreports.com/phishtrack?pid=4905&urls.

 

 

 

 

Now, I know what you're thinking: Shamah's flipped! Everyone says that Internet Explorer has long needed a refurbishing, and tabs are a great idea, as Firefox has proven. The computing public has been abandoning Internet Explorer for Firefox in recent years, and of course Microsoft is concerned over losing market share (although they don't sell IE). Progress is good, and IE7 definitely shows progress on the part of Microsoft's browser.

 

 

Plus, it's not like hordes of Firefox users, many of whom have sworn off IE for ideological reasons - Microsoft is, after all, a Big Bad Corporation and Mozilla is an open-source foundation, after all - are going to abandon Firefox en masse. Sure, IE has add-ons - but they're never going to be as elegant as Firefox's, because Microsoft will never open IE's code sufficiently to integrate them properly. IE add-ons are fated to be clumsy, and expect lots of crashes from "incorrectly implemented code," as Microsoft likes to put it - further distancing the power user community from the program. Programmers of course want their product to appear in a positive light and be "the best," but "best" is a relative term - and in the contest between IE7 and Firefox, what's best for MS programmers may not be best for the bulk of IE's natural audience - or the bottom line.