Digital World: Browser wars redux
You have to wonder what makes a company with 87 percent of the market on a product go out on a limb to “improve” things, making their product look as much as possible as the upstart competition.
I’m glad that as a “power user” I have, in the new Internet Explorer 7, another Web browser I wouldn’t hesitate to use on a regular basis - but I don’t know how the masses of IE users are going to take to the changes. I do know, however, that Firefox users are going to yawn and keep on using their preferred “anti-establishment” browser.
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 now offer pretty much the same thing. 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.
There is a potential memory saving in the new version of Firefox, however, because some of the cool things FF could do in its previous versions via add-on extensions are now part of the program itself. For example, I had been using, in FF 1.5.1, an extension that allowed me to reopen a tab that I accidentally closed. That extension’s functionality is now built into the program, obviating the need for an extension (and of course, the more extensions, the more memory FF requires).
Several other extensions are also no longer necessary for the same reason, while others don’t work with the upgrade at all (although there is a workaround for this, at http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/nightly). So, the upgrade should theoretically have made Firefox less memory-intense than it had been, since I theoretically could work at the same level of efficiency without all those extra extensions. But because a big part of the fun of using Firefox is checking out new extensions, I just installed a new crop of FF 2.0 compatible extensions - so I’m back where I started, dealing with Firefox’s by now legendary memory usage and leaks (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory-Leak).
Not that Internet Explorer 6.x was a “memory saint” either, but now Microsoft, not wanting to be left out of the fun of increased functionality, has jumped onto the extensions bandwagon as well and there are now all sorts of add-ons to make IE more useful such as form fillers, bookmark managers, pop-up killers, etc. With IE7 only a couple of months old (including its beta version), relatively few add-ons are available for it right now, but if you come up with a winner, MS will feature it on the add-on download site (http://www.ieaddons.com), pay you $2500 and give you an all-expenses paid trip to a big-deal Las Vegas computer show if you come up with a really good one
