I'm in Kuala Lumpur now, just back from Penang two days ago. I got to admit, taking the bus to and fro is getting very exhausting these days. Sigh.
Anyway, I'm safe and sound. I'll be working too. But then now I'm going to focus on one thing first. Before I went back to my hometown, I was planning to write my own review on the latest Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7. Now, this is the one. Sort of. Better be late than never.
Okay, I've successfully installed the two browsers. It was quite a breeze. Quite. Be quiet, am I hearing laughters? Being a web designer, I must not have only one Internet Explorer installed on my machine. Thanks to a nice fellow named Yousif Al Saif, I'm able to install old versions of Internet Explorer. The installer is very cool, and I'm beginning to like playing with Internet Explorer 3.0! Haha!
Firefox 2. How should I begin? Ya, about three months ago, someone called Bryan Miller asked me to do a review like I did with the old Winstripe before. At that time, I was surprised yet did not have the time to focus on the Firefox issues. I've gathered all my thoughts but wasn't sure if it's worth to write a second review. I thought my previous review is good enough, as I did not care much whether the Firefox developers would take note of my opinions or not. Yesterday, I was chatting with David Tenser and he mentioned:
i use it all the time so i don't think much about it anymore
before, i was excited when using firefox because i got to shape things and i saw it progressing... now it's so close to the ideal browser i hardly spend time thinking of it
I think he's right about that. Frankly speaking, I did not quite like the new theme either. But fortunately, we Firefox users are blessed with a great feature called themes. There are many nice themes such as the Ubuntu Tango Theme and the good old Winstripe, oops, I mean Winestripe. Choose one, use it and be happy!
Firefox 2 is working great for me, so why do I bother much about Internet Explorer 7 anyway? I use Internet Explorer 7 for few hours and immediately notice that the tabs are kind of weird to me. Maybe I haven't get used to it? To my surprise, the Internet Options hasn't change much after all. Looking at the new user interface of Internet Explorer 7, I start to realise why the Firefox developers remove the native look on some interface widgets on Firefox 2. After some quick testing, I found that even the widgets on Internet Explorer 7 are not that native as well. It looks even worse on the Windows Classic theme!
It's pretty obvious to know who's the winner here.
End of review. Cheers.