Nithin Kamath’s Weblog

The last fortnight saw major updates to the two main browsers viz., Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, with IE trying to retain its mammoth user base and FF trying to grows its user base. I have not gone through the new features available in IE7, but I must say the improvements over IE6 are huge and you should update to IE7 without rethinking.

I am a FF user and have been using the FF 2.0 from its Release Candidate stage, i.e. FF 2 RC1, and have been blown away by the features improvement in this version. Let me make a quick note of the improvements I liked:

• Tab browsing Improvements: The new version has a close button for each of the open tabs, rather than one close button for all the tabs, it makes life much easier while browsing the web. The other major improvement has been ‘Undo Close Tab’, very very useful when you close a tab by mistake and want to get it back.
• Session Resuming: The advantage of using tabs is that one can open as many webpages as one wants, but what if you want to close the browser or browser crashes what happens to the open tabs, in FF2, you can now get back all the open tabs.
• InLine Spell Checking: A major reason to upgrade from FF1.5 to FF2, the inline spell checking works well and helps in pointing out errors, especially useful for users who type fast and of course for those words which have always confused you.
• There are various other features like, a newer slick theme, integration of the addon/theme manager, Phishing protection, and how could I forget the improved RSS/XML feed handling capabilities with an option to add it to any web based reader or a software reader along with preview capabilities.

So people update you browser to its latest version and experience the internet from a whole new perspective, the browser wars are going to hot up even more, considering that FF 2 has had over two million downloads in first 24 hours with a peak rate of over 30 downloads a second, means that MS is going to work harder and try to innovate new features into IE, the future is certainly good. Happy browsing.