FireFox 2.0 + Internet Explorer 7: Features Comparison

Posted by somu on 10/20/06 in Featured, Web browsers

Microsoft IE 7 has already been released to the market for Windows XP SP2. If you haven’t downloaded it already, you can find it here. Firefox 2.0 will also be released pretty soon.

There are some features which are pretty good in IE 7 when compared to the previous versions. Its been almost five years since the release of a major version of IE. So there definitely will be expectations amongst its users. IE is still the market leader in terms of browser usage.

But overall, I have to say that IE 7 isn’t that impressive. Even though there are major feature changes, compared to its previous versions, the feature set is almost what Firefox has already had for a while

Features:

RSS Integration: The RSS feature is integrated with the browser itself. You can subscribe to the news, sports or shopping feeds and view them in the browser. FF 1.5.x has this feature too, called “Live Bookmark”. Further with FF2, full-featured integration will be available.
Built in Fraud Websites Detector: IE 7 boasts that they have a detector which is not available in FireFox. This feature has an inbuilt facility that warns you if you land on a fake website, and redirects you away from it. Even though this feature is not available in FF 1.5.x, the new FF2 will have it.
Compatability: IE 7 works well only in Windows-based OSes like Windows XP & Windows Vista. But FireFox can run well on major OSes such as Linux and Mac, as well as Windows, and nearly identically. Further, with so many sites having to IE hacks in HTML and CSS to achieving what should be standard page rendering, these sites might actually get blocked in IE7 due to the new security feature.
Tabbed browsing: Ah finally. But this feature has been in FireFox, Mozilla, and Opera for quite a long time, not to mention Newer versions of Netscape.
Search box: IE 7 may have introduced a search box into its user interface, but its been a standard feature in Firefox and Safari for a long time.
Quick Tabs: This feature allows you to view thumbnails of all the pages in one page. You can switch between these pages or close them from this view itself. This is really cool I guess, but FF2 will have it as well. Though it’s of questionable value to a power user.
Favorites: If you have “favorites” in a side panel at your left, you can open all your sites in tabs with a single click. But it’s inconsistent because if your “favorites” is at the top of the browser, there is no one-click ability.