Internet Explorer V Firefox.

When i booted up my PC this morning it kindly asked if i would like to download Internet Explorer 7. What the hell, i thought, after all it couldn’t be any worse than version 6 and i always have Firefox 2 to fall back on if version 7 is also rubbish. My next thought was, what the hell am i talking about? I don’t even know what the differences between Internet Explorer and Firefox are, I had just heard people berating both - so I have found out.

Internet Explorer 6 v Internet Explorer 7
In version 7, the bulky top bar containing home, refresh, print etc... has gone leaving a substantially simplified bar. The next big difference you will notice are the 'Tabs'. Instead of having to open a new window for each web page you are in you can now just open a new tab and click to move between them. You can even add a group of tabs to your favorites so that all the windows will open at once. Version 7 has also fixed some existing memory leaks so you should now see nearly a doubling in performance.


What does all this mean? Basically your pages are more efficiently organised and should load a lot faster on the new version. You can download IE7 here.

Internet Explorer 7 v Firefox 2
Firefox has proved to be almost twice as quick as IE7. It also has tabs, although you have to manually open a new tab from the 'File' menu. New security features exist that stop hackers trying to get onto your machine, and there is an inline spell checker. You can download Firefox2 here



Conclusions
Don’t bother with IE7 go straight to using Firefox. It is almost 4 times as quick as IE6 so you should feel a noticeable difference. They already have a 10% market share and who wants to line Microsofts' pockets even more anyway...