I installed MS IE7 on the 19th...

what a piece of garbage. I cannot understand the advantage of tabbed browsing. I basically have that with IE6...all the open sites are tabbed on the task bar....so what's the big whoopeee ?

Slow...yes, larger window space, but who cares? No quick link toolbar...you can make homepage tabs, but then ALL of those open at the same time, and if one of them is a bit slow loading, it bogs down the entire mess.
I started having complete page halts...everything locked up. Had to actually hit the hardware reset because nothng would come up. Complete waste.

I did a system restore just a bit ago, and my good ol IE 6 is back in place. Thank the software gods for the restore point.

I never liked firefox , opera, or any of those othe rbrowsers either, so this shouldn't surprise me.

Firefox has tabbed browsing - it is the most POPULAR browser on the planet.  You are an abberation! ;D

I would rather tabs in a single app window then have to deal with 50 separate windows - especially clogging up my taskbar - which, thank you very much, I'd like to use for applications - not 50  instances of a single one!

When you have those 50 IEs open, find me your Outlook in less than 30 seconds - I can do it in aobut 0.5 using that horrid, horrid tabbed browser interface of Firefox. ;P

Did I mention that Firefox also doesn't have the vulnerabilities build directly into IE?  Expect more crashes and freezes.

hmm..noticed they were in Firefox, but hadn't paid attention..;) Wonder what a malware magnet IE7 is...

outlook resides in a separate box on the taskbar...the other iterations of IE are all stacked in their own pile. I just click on the pile...all the titles are there, I pick the one I want to go to. No problem, just like tabbed browsing. I've been using it this way since day 1 and it works prefectly fine for me :)
Maybe I am an abberation, but I'm a happy one using IE6 .. and i rarely have a crash with it...less than rarely, actually. Maybe I'm an exception, but as long as it works, I'm aok.
I used to be the first on the block to download and use new software, especially intenet browsers and all that. I've done tons of beta work.  I've now found a product I enjoy using and don't need the new, better???? products. It seems every time i try a new thing, I'm just not happy using it, so its time to just stick with what I like to use.
Its like that with a lot of Poser users too..they're still using P4 or with pro pack, and perfectly content and happy with it. Sometimes the new bells and whistles just don't fit with everybody.

IE 7 has lots bugs.  I use Mozilla-Firefox and have sent links to friends who are using IE 7 and they can't get to the website.  They change to a different browser and then can.  There are other bugs that I've heard, but they escape me right now.

I'll stick to Mozilla :)  I love the tabbed browsing and the various extensions that I can download to customize it the way I want it.

I tried IE7when it was beta and it blew chunks as far as I'm concerned. Firefox has nothing to worry about. I hit firefox and it loads immedately, I hit IE7 and I'm waiting around for it to decide when it's goign to load.

Haven't seen that inteface on the taskbar (but then I avoid IE like da plague).  Is this IE7 only?  Windows XP Pro here.  I'd have to fire up the other box to see what happens in Windows XP x64.

Nonetheless, you still have to go to the taskbar and click on the 'button' and scroll through the popup list.  In Firefox, I move the mouse over the tab and click - done. ;)  Additionally, my taskbar is auto-hide, so I'd also have to get it to popup first (the slam-the-cursor on the screen bottom maneuver).

Some questions about IE7:

Is there a way to close all other IE 'windows' except the one you are on?

Can you bookmark all of the open windows in one group/action?

Can you open a group of bookmarks at once?

ETA: Oh, I see that the taskbar feature only kicks in if you have several of the same app running and it 'eventually' groups them into a popup button.  See.  I've never seen it because I never have more than one browser window opened. :)

It isnt IE doing that. it is windows. its a standard XP feature called grouping... once you have enough instances of a single program (along with other programs) open to fill your task bar it will push instances of the same program into a group. this is a feature that can be turned off.

The reason i prefer firefox tabs over task bar is that it puts all my web pages in their own line up, not stacked. when i need to minize them i can just minimize the single instance of foxfire.

second (some of this is just how i set mine up) i can middle click to open a link (or bookmark) in a new tab, and middle click a tab to close the tab.

third... and one of the ones i really like is that i can open up a forum and middle click each thread i want to see. Firefox will open each thread in its own tab (without switching to them). then i can go thru the tabs reading what i want.

I know ie has comperable features that may only require one or two more clicks, but i prefer it this way.

I am also one of those few quite happy with IE. Haven't installed IE7 yet.
Actually, I am using tabbed browsing and many of those Firefox features for quite some time...
Have been using MyIE, now Maxthon Browser (http://www.maxthon.com/) which needs IE to
be installed.

Tried Mozilla and Firefox in the past, but that caused a lot of trouble with some pages using
lot's of Java and/or Flash.

Since I use Windows 2000, IE7 isn't an option. I tried FireFox and didn't like it. Then I found Slim Browser, similar to Maxthon in that it uses the IE core but adds tabs, additional secutity and a lot of other features. I was really happy with that until for some reason an update rendered it unstable. I didn't want to spend time trying to track down the problem so I started using Opera. It works fine, though a bit slow on my old system, and has plenty of the bells and whistles. There are a very few sites that have minor problems with graphics displaying but other than that it's solid and probably less of a target for malware than IE or FireFox. The main downside is that all the 3rd party toolbars, accessories, etc. are only usually available for IE and FF. Most of the reviews I seen of IE7 seem to see it is good but not great, just catching up with FF in terms of features (though FF has a new release Tuesday I think). I haven't read anything about widespread problems with crashes or lockups but that is the nature of software, especially with the huge variety of hardware and software variations under Windows, someone's always going to have problems.

Quote - here's a scree of my desktop...its like a tab...pick the one i want...viola, there i am. You can only look at one screen at a time anyway.

What I like about Firefox is I can drag a link from the page I'm on to another
tab, or create a new tab and drag the link to that.  Does multiple instances
of IE6 on the taskbar allow you to do that? 

What I like about Firefox is I run a scan with my anti-spyware software and nothing comes up. I just open IE and run anti-spyware and it always has to clean something off - whether I went travelling or not.

With IE, it's like instead of me spraying OFF on me to keep bugs away I just sprayed ON onto my body to attract ALL bugs

Does Firefox work better because it is better or because the hackers are all out to hack Microsoft first?

What makes Firefox not get so much spyware hits?

Like lmckenzie, I use win 2000 and Slimbrowser. It's basically a new front end for IE6, but it adds about a million extra options over the standard IE, including tabbed browsing, middle click, etc. It can also switch on/off java, activeX, etc with one click. Very nice browser. It can even open all the sites used in your last session if you want.

I've tried firefox, Opera, etc, and don't like any of them. When I see a browser with a Google search bar that I can't get rid of, I'm immediately turned off.

mac

I guess I don't understand the tab concept. Why do I want to drag a link to a tab or create a new tab?
If I want to go back to a page, I just allow the box to be open...if I want to go back to it, I go to the window taskbar and click it...viola, there it is. I don't have to drag or create anything.
The sites I visit all the time are set up as quick links on the IE menu bar...bango bango..I click and up it comes.
In iE7, maybe its different with FF and Opera, the saved tabs all try to open at one time...if any of the sites are down or slow, it brought the entire app to a basically locked state...probably a bug in IE7, but then I couldn't choose any tab without that new window also locking. I couldn't find a way to save my super favorite sites to a menu bar or whatever. Had to save them as home tabs...

The only real significant advantage in my mind would be less vulnerability to spyware, etc,
I'm sure there are others that you guys obviously enjoy, but I've tried FF and Opera and deleted them both from my hard drive after using them for a couple of weeks each.

Quote - > Quote - here's a scree of my desktop...its like a tab...pick the one i want...viola, there i am. You can only look at one screen at a time anyway.

What I like about Firefox is I can drag a link from the page I'm on to another
tab, or create a new tab and drag the link to that.  Does multiple instances
of IE6 on the taskbar allow you to do that? 

I didn't understand the point of tabbed browsing when I first switched to Firefox.

But now I love it.  I use it as a way of keeping organized.  I often have dozens of Web sites open at the same time.  Tabbed browsing allows me to sort of stack them in piles, the way you would papers on a desktop.  For example, I'll have a window with news stories open, a window with my favorite sports message boards, a window with DAZ threads, one with Rosity threads, etc.  Each window may have two or twenty tabs in it.  Trying to sort through that many windows on the taskbar is a PITA, but sorted via tabbed browsing, it's easy.

I guess I'm not doing that sort of stuff, that's why the tabs don't make sense to me. I rarely have more than  a couple of windows open at a time. I go to one site, read whatever I'm interested in, than go to the next. I may have 3 or 4 open, but that's kind of rare.
So on my quik link menu bar in IE6, I go to DAZ, for example, then when i'm done, I click the rendo link, then RDNA, etc etc...so it basically works like a tab, I suppose, but I don't have the other sites open.

I got in the habit of having multiple windows open when I used Netscape and was on dial-up.  Renderosity was so slow that you could grow old and die waiting for product pages/forum threads to open.  So I'd open 20 or so pages at a time, whether browsing the forum or the Marketplace.  By the time I was finished reading the first page, the next would be open. 

When I switched to IE, I found it really annoying that pages in new windows would "pop to the top" when they finished loading, interrupting my reading.  (Netscape didn't used to do that.)  Tabs fix that problem. 

Even though I'm have broadband now, I still go through the forums and MP opening all the pages I'm interested in at once, then slowing reading through them.  IME, it still saves time. 

Quote - I guess I don't understand the tab concept. Why do I want to drag a link to a tab or create a new tab?
If I want to go back to a page, I just allow the box to be open...if I want to go back to it, I go to the window taskbar and click it...viola, there it is. I don't have to drag or create anything.
The sites I visit all the time are set up as quick links on the IE menu bar...bango bango..I click and up it comes.
In iE7, maybe its different with FF and Opera, the saved tabs all try to open at one time...if any of the sites are down or slow, it brought the entire app to a basically locked state...probably a bug in IE7, but then I couldn't choose any tab without that new window also locking. I couldn't find a way to save my super favorite sites to a menu bar or whatever. Had to save them as home tabs...
 

Well, unless you're visiting several sites at the same time (either cross-referencing something, looking something up without leaving the site you were on, or waiting for a slow site to finish loading), then tabs have little that would interest you.

And in IE7 (or any browser with tabs) saving a page as a home tab is a very bad idea. That's bring any program to a screeching halt if you had enough.

You have to use the little stars on the left side of the "menu bar" to manage your bookmarks, and whatever you do, don't open the bookmarks menu and click that blue arrow. Common sense (and prior experience with IE6 and below) would make you think that expands a folder with bookmarks, but it actually opens the whole damn lot as tabs.

I still prefer Firefox to IE7, mostly because FF gives me the option to hide the tab section if I've only got one open, IE7 doesn't. And really, with a screen resolution of 1280x1024, I don't find the extra viewing space granted by removing the standard menu bar to be that impressive. Hell, it's not even an extra quarter inch on my screen.

And I have to deal with far fewer instances of spyware and malware with Firefox than IE.

I like Firefox's extensions.  IE is so bloated, because everything's built in...and it still doesn't do the things Firefox can. 

My favorite extensions:

Ad-Block.  Install Ad-Block and the Filterset, and 80% of the ads on the net vanish. Popups, pop-unders, banners, etc. - gone.  I also recommend Ad-Block Plus.

IE Tab - allows you to open a link in an IE tab.  For the roughly 1 out of 50 sites that doesn't display correctly in Firefox.

NoScript - prevents scripts from running, unless you permit it.

Flashblock - blocks Flash, unless you permit it.

DownloadThemAll - a mass downloader.  I've been able to download files with this that I couldn't download the usual way.

Text size Toolbar - let you adjust text size with a click.

Colorzilla - allows you to get the RGB coordinates of any color you click on.  So if you want the background of your image to precisely match that mint-green hue DAZ uses as a background color, you can.

BBCodeXTra - allows you to easily add links, images, quotes, etc., on HTML or BBCode message boards.

Quote - And I have to deal with far fewer instances of spyware and malware with Firefox than IE.

Ain't that the truth...

My wife uses IE on her PC, because the Korean TV websites work through ActiveX and I can't get them to pass through any other browser...

But as a result, I'm always having to fix that machine, and spent a few hours yesterday removing a trojan called 'time.exe' and 'e.exe' that kept putting itself back in after every reboot even after the anti-virus software had cleared it out... Finally got the bugger on the third reboot.

ok....I just reinstalled FireFox ...
One thing straight out is that it places all my favorite super sites on a menu bar like IE..I like that. The pages seem to load much faster, although this place is slow to access as usuall, but then it just pops up and is there.
I'll give it another go, I like it better than IE7 already.

Changing the subject slightly:
In the world of computers, there are programs and documents. For years now, programs were always able to open multiple documents in the same program. If you wanted to switch between your open documents, you went to the menu option and selected which document to work with.
 
With IE, Microsoft broke this usability standard: instead of keeping all web pages within one program, IE opens a new copy of itself.
Then, starting with Office 2000 (or was it '97?), Microsoft continued this trend: if you open two Word documents, you'll have two copies of Word open... instead of one copy of Word containing two documents.
They must have realized that this was causing too many open programs on the Taskbar, so they created "grouping" in Windows so all the open copies of Word would stack up on each other.
Imagine if this idea extended to all programs: if you want to work with a second Photoshop document, yep- another copy of Photoshop has to be opened. How many copies of Photoshop could you open before your computer runs out of memory and gives up? (I frequently load 10-15 files into Photoshop and run a "batch convert" action. Imagine if Windows tried to open 15 copies of Photoshop!)
Then why do users need to open a second copy of Word to work with a second Word document?
 
Personally, I think tabbed browsing is the correct way to do things: all of your web pages are contained in a single web browser and you don't have to guess which IE contains which page.
And, yes, it is faster to glance at the tabs instead of going to the taskbar, clicking on the IE group, and trying to find the page to work with.

To quantify what JHoagland is getting at here - each execution of an application setups its own little memory space and allocates resources.  When you load a bunch of tabs in Firefox, the application just uses the necessary 'resources' for each new page display - but not for an entire application launch and initialization process!  Some things are shared no matter how many times an application runs (or how many applications run) - dlls for instance - and it is possible that Word and MSIE are sharing some resources between their 'instances' - but doubtfully the memory space and certain resources.

I agree completely with your assessment!

Opera Devotee here, (yeah I know there is one in every crowd ) has used tabbed browsing for years, and no need to open a seperate email reader as an excellent email program is built in, even opens up in a tab so switching between web pages and email is as simple as clicking a tab.

I prefer tabbed browsing msyself.

I have several groups that I've set up and in the a.m. when I do my surfing, run the browser, select a group, ALL of the sites in that group come up and I surf/tab away.

I use tabs while browsing the galleries here.

We all know how slow this site can be at times.  When I'm looking through the galleries and find a thumbnail that looks interesting, I open it in a new tab.  While that is loading, I'm still looking through the thumbnails, opening more in more tabs.  Then I click on the next page link and look at the images I opened in new tabs while the next page is loading.  By the time I'm done looking and commenting, the next gallery page is loaded in the original tab and ready to go.

BTW Firefox 2.0 is out if anyone wants to get the new version:

http://www.mozilla.com

thanks. I'll set it up tonight. Some of the add-ons look interesting as well.

That's interesting as I'm running 1.5, but doing a "Check for Updates..." says there are none.  Maybe they don't consider 2.0 'an update'.

Firefox 2.0 is still in beta. It won't be considered an update until it has been officially released.

I use two browsers regularly - One is Deepnet Explorer, which uses the IE rendering engine but makes it WAAAYYY better. You can block ads, filter Flash, stop popups, etc. It is lso a tabbed browser. It also include a newsreader and a P2P client (optionally, if that's your thing.) Can't recommend it highly enough.  Also it will not work with those troublesome Browser Hellper Objects (used primarily for drive-by spyware installs, although Google and Yahoo toolbars are also this type of thingy.)

My other browser is Firefox, which needs no introduction. Generally it's Deepnet for work, Firefox for play.

Why tabbed browsing? Ebay is reason enough. I have a list of 20 items to check out, I can open them all in separate tabs (this is just a drag & drop gesture in Deepnet, no keyboard needed, a big timesaver.) I can peruse items, close them if I'm not interested, etc. without ever losing the context of the original list. I handle Poser forum topics the same way.

IE users can use the windows XP grouping to handle windows in a similar way, but it's not available on Windows 2K which I run on my laptop, plus I've always found the grouping thing to be flaky, and it doesn't kick in unitl you hit some kind of threshold. Windows controls it, not me, whcih is reason enough not to use it. Plus closing an IE window doesn't neccesarily return you to your previous IE window - it just shows you the app that's stacked under IE on the desktop, whatver that is.

Tabs are good for research too. With Deepnet, I can save 10 or 15 relevant links to a favorites group, then come back later and open them all at once in their own tabs with a single click. Don't know if Firefox can do this.

Well that explains it then. :)

Thanks, Jimdoria!

IE7 looks good to me so far. I like how easy it is to set up custom search engines (my default search is now the MSDN Libary). I'm not gonna change to IE full time (Opera's mouse gestures are just too addictive), but I'm pleasantly surprised so far.

just got a note at work, noone in the company is to download it..;)

IE7 or Firefox 2.0?

Quote - Firefox 2.0 is still in beta. It won't be considered an update until it has been officially released.

It went final on the 24th:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2006-10-24.html

Quote - That's interesting as I'm running 1.5, but doing a "Check for Updates..." says there are none.  Maybe they don't consider 2.0 'an update'.

Actually you are quite correct, they dont update major versions with the check for updates thing. It didnt work for when they released the 1.5 version either IIRC.

IE7..;) or as I like to think of it...IEEEE! (cut to sound of the little hooded guys in Star Wars..;)

hmmp! Another MIcrosoft copy of Apple! Safari (the internet browser for Macintosh) has had tabs forever. Welcome to the Internet.