The folks at Microsoft totally redesigned their browser such that Internet Explorer 7 looks at whole lot like Firefox. Mozilla has countered with Firefox 2.
CNET set its reviewers out to test the two browsers in a “prizefight” of five rounds: ease of installation, look and community, tabbed browsing, cool new features, and security and performance.
Not surprisingly, given the issues focused upon, Firefox 2 won. All five rounds, in fact. By a knockout.
Of course, had they considered such things as the ability to easily browse on computers at hotels, businesses, and Internet cafes or ability to handle really poorly written code at a wide variety of websites, IE might have fared better.
I downloaded and installed 2.0 earlier this morning and don’t notice a lot of difference from 1.5. The main innovation seems to be the ability to close individual tabs, which are now highlighted, more easily. This may turn out to be a boon once I’m used to it but, since I’m used to being able to close the tab by clicking the X at the right of the window, it’s rather annoying to have to find the current tab and carefully click on it.
I’ve been using Firefox since pre-1.0 but am not a power user, having installed few extensions and preferring to use a Web-based rather than browser-based RSS reader. Thus, I’m likely missing out on many of the new features.
UPDATE: The “restore session” feature is nice, if not 100% perfect. It recalls the windows you had open so that, in the event of an unexpected system failure, you don’t lose the results of your browsing.
(Heh: I discovered this the hard way and came back to see that Steven Taylor had noted this in the comments, too.)
