With the recent production release of Internet Explorer 7, I thought it was time to revisit my default browser decision. I’ve been fairly happy with Firefox, but have had a few annoyances:
- Copy/paste of HTML tables into applications (Microsoft Word and Excel) doesn’t work nearly as well as with IE
- Proxy changes don’t happen without at least an extra trip to the options. To be fair, IE 6 didn’t handle it at all, but since the browser lacked tabs, starting a new instance wasn’t a difficulty
- Some internal web sites designed the authentication in a manner that required another click to get in
- When printing, some pages arrive with parts chopped off from the right
- Some web sites (e.g. Wachovia) would break randomly for no apparent reason. Sometimes they would work, sometimes not
Well, I installed IE7 and it seemed ok. I found a mouse gesture plugin to compensate for the lack of something built in. I tried setting it as my default browser, but after using it a bit I had it crash a couple times. The session manager built in apparently assumes this will never happen, because not once did it restore my session from a crash, which is something that I’ve had for over a year in Firefox via the Tab Mix Plus extension.
Other than the fatal flaw, I agree wholeheartedly with the Cnet.com review of IE7. Firefox remains my default browser.