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.
Comments (2)
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
Posted by andy | February 25, 2007 11:57 PM
Posted on February 25, 2007 23:57
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.
Posted by Ken | February 26, 2007 12:08 AM
Posted on February 26, 2007 00:08