Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7
Two major browsers released their new versions almost concurrently. So I figured I’d give both a quick comparative run. Following is a random sampling of the new things that are most obvious, interesting or irritating to me.
Tabs
Before digging down to individual browsers, let’s take a comparative look at the tabs. FF2 is badly underperforming here, while IE has been playing some serious catch-up. Here are the screenshots of Google, Firefox and Microsoft pages.
To Firefox guys, here’s a question. What the hell were you thinking when doing that color scheme for the tabs? What was wrong with the old one? What the hell is that shading/chrome/metal effect doing there? I understand you’re trying to be cool, but on my display, it’s crap. More scientifically, “crap” means that especially on the non-active tabs, there is too little contrast between the text and the tab background, and the shading makes it even harder to read. So, sorry to say, tabs in FF2 are a step backwards from a geek user’s point of view. Come on, guys. Opera can do non-retarded tabs. Internet Explorer does it now. Firefox did also previously, so what gives you had to mess it up :(
Just look at the Microsoft tabs. Much more elegant. And dare I say, the color scheme with the non-active tab with the plain background and cornered border and no silly “Close” button is EXACTLY like it was in earlier Firefox versions.
Firefox 2
The good thing about this version is that just like the previous versions, the installer was just a few megabytes in size. But then again, that’s just about the only cool things there was.
There are no screenshots of FF2 simply because the UI, apart from the tabs, has not really changed. And as shown by the tabs example, bad changes are much worse than just leaving things in a working state.
One of the worst nuisances of FF2 is the one that Ben Metcalfe points out: it does not preserve form state when accidentally pressing “back” or “forward”. I confirmed this myself: indeed, it just nukes your data. When you navigate away from a page, what you entered in the form is voided in the cyberspace with no further warning, unless the web page/form/application you’re using has itself a warning embedded for this. Come on guys. COME ON! This worked just fine in FF1.5. So again, what the hell?
So there are some other, less interesting changes too.
- previously, when viewing images inline, you could have them auto-zoomed to the window size. I always turned it off because I didn’t like the inline image filtering. Now, even if you’re viewing them full size, you can click on them and have them fit to browser window. Yawn. Especially when the filter use is simply pixel interlacing, so that the smaller image in most cases makes zero sense. Come on guys. It’s not like we live in 1989 and work with AT-286 computers and proper image filtering/resampling would be a real performance problem.
- inline spellchecker for forms. YAWN. I’m not using the browser as text editor. And neither should you, because of the form data loss problem discussed above. So maybe it’s useful for some folks who write their emails and such in webmail systems. Well, I don’t. So I turned it off. There was no apparent way to work with the dictionary and update languages and I’m pretty sure it only supports English.
- encoding autodetection has something wrong. Mitchell’s blog at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/ was autodetected as ISO-8859-1 (Latin1), even though it’s clearly marked in the source as UTF-8. (Mitchell Baker is the CEO of Mozilla.) Ouch.
Internet Explorer 7
… has gotten a serious UI rework. Not sure if it’s good or bad yet, but Microsoft takes its UI design process quite seriously and radically and IE7 is sort of preview of what we’ll see in Windows Vista and Office 2007, with changes such as removing the menu bar by default. They put a lot of usability work and testing into this, and it’s paying off. I’m not sure if I like or dislike it yet, but it sort of “feels OK”.
The installation was typically Microsoftish. I downloaded an installer stub of 10 megs or something, which then downloaded a lot of updates, required a restart and I now have 200M less free disk space, as it updated some system components.
So let’s see what’s new…
What’s with the “look ma, I’ve got hepatitis” icon? (Not) changing the icon is the part when FF2 got it right again, and MS didn’t. Why do you have to change the icon with every major release? On my display, it looks very “hepatitis”, or too yellow. Here it is in original and zoomed size.
Quick tabs provide a thumbnailed view of all your open tabs. Not sure why that’s good or useful yet.
Page zoomer. This one is cool. Instantly resize any page. Images are simply zoomed and pixelated and text is re-rendered with new font size, leading to some obvious layout trouble. Still, can see where it is useful, especially with folks with impaired vision where you need to read some “too small” flyspeck-print article.
Feed reader. I think this is the first time where a mainstream browser (meaning FF or IE) includes a non-retarded feed reader in default configuration. Looks nice and the inline view is a bit similar to what Feedburner provides.
Phishing filter. This has been available to both FF and IE previously with things like Google Toolbar, but is now inline. Not bad.
Download Internet Explorer or Mozilla. Or Opera that has a good potential of becoming the geek browser du jour as Firefox keeps getting more bloated and interface keeps getting messed up, despite what they claim themselves. Many of my geek friends have switched already a while ago. I’m seriously considering if Firefox doesn’t get their tab and form act together.
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