nEw br0wz4rz!!!11one [updated]

[UPDATE: It turns out that this wasn’t the official 2.0 build of Firefox. They’re working on it, it comes out tomorrow… And this one isn’t official. Though I have a hunch that it still will have those bugs come tomorrow, so my rant is still (probably) valid. ]

So the big new versions of Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox are out… I’ve been jumping between Firefox 1.5.0.7 and Opera 9 for a while now, with heavy bias on the Firefox side.

I had to thoroughly test the beta and release of IE7 for work (Micro$oft owns my department’s soul, so no OSS for us) and I got to know it pretty well. I was mainly just excited because this means that a bunch of public terminals will finally support tabbed browsing. I spent a good part of the last two weeks at work trying to get IE to fail, and it didn’t happen. As a matter of fact, for (heavy) day-to-day browsing it has no functional difference from Firefox for me. Sure, there are some nitpicky differences, but nothing that important. So a long story short, I really like it, at least in comparison to the four-year-old IE6. It still has a couple of problems – namely, major CSS shortcomings, and resource-hoggage. I have the same three tabs open in IE7 and FF2, and IE is taking 64MB. FF is taking 32. Oh, and IE’s rendering engine hasn’t changed since IE4. That came out with, um…. Windows 98?

Firefox 2 will be great in a couple of revisions. I think it was rushed out of the door to compete with IE7’s release last week. I have the “final version” – not a release candidate – and it’s crashing as much as the beta and RC2 did. Except that it’s supposedly a final release, which shouldn’t still have those bugs. That kind of instability in a final release is unacceptable. It’s crashed twice in the last 10 minutes on me… with simple browsing.

So for now, I’ll be using Internet Explorer 7, until I can browse happy again. I feel so… dirty. But it’s amazing that IE7 is good enough to not drive me completely insane, and still feel as good as FF 1.5.0.7 did.