IE steps up to the plate
This will come as no surprise if you read Slashdot on a daily basis, but Microsoft released their IE 7 beta yesterday. They upgraded their feature set to include a bunch of features that Firefox has had since the outset, like tabbed browsing, management for RSS feeds, and a search engine box in the toolbar. It’s too little too late, if you ask me; even if they manage to do all these Firefox features as well as Firefox does, they can’t hope to match all the bitchin’ extensions that Firefox has. And I wish I could find the link now to this story, but I remember reading last year that a lot of employees at Microsoft used Firefox at their workstations. How much of a punch in the nuts is that?
I won’t be switching back to IE. In fact, for those few sites out there that are Internet Explorer-only for some reason, I have the IE Tab extension so that I can open an Internet Explorer tab inside Firefox. Can you see Microsoft offering a plug-in so that you can open Firefox tabs inside of their browser?
In the end, though, I suppose it’s a good thing Microsoft got with the picture, if only because in the same way that the competition from Mozilla’s innovations finally forced Microsoft to make a better browser, this will probably inspire the people who work on Firefox to come up with even cooler shit. And who benefits from all this competition? You and me.
