IE Devoured Again

Less than one week after Microsoft launched their next-generation web browser, IE 7, the Mozilla foundation released Firefox 2, once again upping the ante for standards and quality in a web-surfing environment.

Microsoft's new version of Explorer was boasted to have many technological, "innovative" advancements such as tabbed browsing (I've had that for years), RSS feeds (been using those since Firefox 1.0), and "instant search box" (been standard with Firefox since its' inception), and anti-phishing security measures.

Okay, the anti-phishing thing was an impressive addition to IE's features -- and it was something that, apparently, hadn't been integrated into other web browsers -- that is until yesterday.

In fact, the anti-phishing measures as described in this message have been available to end-users if they were informed enough (and willing to use beta software) to use the development releases of Firefox 2.0. So I guess IE's inclusion of this technology wasn't as innovative as it was first perceived.

I have already installed Firefox 2, and it is a definite improvement over its predecessor. It's blazingly fast, secure, the aesthetics are more pleasing, and the availability of seemingly countless extensions are a home run, which it seems to be, as the new version has already been downloaded a few million times since its' release yesterday.

It seems that the only thing Microsoft managed to accomplish with the release of IE 7, is play catch up. They're going to be in the dust by the time they release IE 8, which should be out sometime next century.