Okay, so the title's a rather lame attempt at humor. But within the same week I've done a double upgrade -- Firefox (now at version 2.0) and Internet Explorer 7.
I've been sold on Firefox for some time now, if only because of little things. The RSS feed system, for instance, or the fact that its CSS and JavaScript implementations are a little less ... well ... quirky than IE's. And I know that's a matter of debate and opinion, but after doing a good deal of programming on a website that used a fair amount of both I quickly came to resent the way I had to make special cases for IE too much of the time.
So far IE7 has been impressive -- a little crowded in the UI at the top bar for my tastes, but I think that's more due to me not having tweaked the browser as thoroughly as I've tweaked FF. (The same crowded-UI complaint seems to be endemic with Vista's version of Explorer, and maybe for the same reasons: perhaps you just need to turn some stuff off.) The new FF has a number of incremental changes -- nothing really revolutionary unless you count built-in in-line spell checking as revolutionary -- but does load and render pages noticeably faster than its predecessor.
For a long time I was actually not using the generic-vanilla Firefox, but a custom build called "stipespeed", compiled from the Firefox source and optimized specifically for my processor set. I loved it, and it looks like Stipe will be creating a custom build of FF 2.0 in a bit as well; I want to see how much faster that flies compared to the native build.
And as you can guess, I'm not planning to give up FF for IE anytime soon, if only out of habit. I am more or less forced to run both of them anyway, to see how well the web designs I create render on the 99% or so of browsers in use out there. (For the sake of fairness, I have tried Opera, and eventually went back to Firefox after growing disenchanted with its own frustrating batch of quirks. I'll try the newer versions, but again, I can't promise anything.)
