Is the new IE broswer, Beta 2 as good as Firefox?

February 20, 2006 7:36 AM

Is the beta2 Internet Explorer broswer as good as or a replacement for Firefox?

Microsoft has released Beta2 browser for IE browser and claims it is much more secure and makes amends for shortcmings of previous browser, the one that got so many to switch to Firefox. Is it as good as Firefox now?

posted by Postroad to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Not even close, if you ask me, from a regular user perspective. Tab functionality is not nearly as good. No extensions. And very buggy. Also, it looks quite unfinished.
posted by loquax at 7:43 AM on February 20, 2006

No. It's a joke, really. I use IE and FF at work 8 hours a day, and IE7,...well,....it sucks.
posted by chrisfromthelc at 7:48 AM on February 20, 2006

Extremely buggy.

Also, the IE devs have swallowed the bitter pill of fixing CSS bugs in their rendering engine, which has the practical effect of breaking a lot of major sites out there that accommodate IE6 with specific CSS "hacks" -- which no longer work in IE7.

Long story short, IE7 not ready for prime time, and the Web isn't ready for IE7, either.
posted by killdevil at 7:50 AM on February 20, 2006

No.
posted by blag at 8:27 AM on February 20, 2006

Stick with Firefox until after IE7 finally ships. If there are sites that "require" IE, you still will want IE6 around for those as sites like my bank will sniff out IE7 and tell users to use IE6, Safari or Firefox.
posted by birdherder at 8:32 AM on February 20, 2006

Not really sure that this can possibly be true, but yesterday I was on hotmail.com trying to reply to an email using IE7 and it was buggier than a camel's saddle.
posted by Jofus at 9:08 AM on February 20, 2006

I've blocked it from all my sites. It's extremely buggy and it not only crashed explorer routinely, but it was causing a lot of problems with CSS rendering and javascript that works fine on Firefox, Safari, and IE 5+ (so I'm pretty sure it's not my stylesheets or code).

Stay away until the final version. Here's an decent breakdown of a lot of the bugs in the beta versions of IE7.
posted by purephase at 9:24 AM on February 20, 2006

I've blocked it from all my sites.

Why?
posted by yerfatma at 9:26 AM on February 20, 2006

I've had better luck with it than most. It's not ready for primetime but I do see a lot of potential in it. I will give IE7 final version a college try but I think we'll have to wait at least untill IE7 SP1 for a really decent browser.
posted by riffola at 10:27 AM on February 20, 2006

The new IE is clearly an improvement over the previous versions. I haven't experienced any bugginess yet, but I've mainly been using it in short bursts.

For me, though, the thing that makes FF unequalled is the extensions and the community around it. Even though there are the add-ons for IE, it just doesn't seem likely that there will be the same kind of rabid support that generates all of the fun and interesting extensions that one gets with FF. Not to mention I have hard time imagining the IE folks letting something like AdBlock through.
posted by camcgee at 11:54 AM on February 20, 2006

I've been using firefox for quite a while now, including numerous extensions.

When I took a look at the new IE, it looked to me like IE is merely trying to mimic firefox. If a user is comfortable with downloading and installing stuff, then firefox is a superior product, IMHO.

If someone isn't very computer savvy, then the new IE appears to automatically give them a few firefox features. These folks will never switch to firefox anyway, so why not give them a scaled down pseudo-firefox browser?

Of course, I always keep both firefox and IE on my computer -- just in case.
posted by bim at 12:38 PM on February 20, 2006

yerfatma writes "Why?"

I explained my reasoning in my answer. As much as they may have tried to fix the earlier mistakes of breaking away from w3c standards, their attempt was sorely lacking. It broke a number of page elements that work well in all the other browsers and, until the final version is released, I figured it was just easier to block it.
posted by purephase at 1:21 PM on February 20, 2006