I spent some time this week to take a look at the release candidates of the two browsers. I am a great MS supporter, but on the other hand I prefer Firefox for browsing so far, so I was (I hope) not biased at all.

I started with IE7, download and install – no problems. Started and went on to do my usual browsing with it. Soon I felt kinda sluggish browsing with it. Started Firefox 1.5 along and started visiting the same pages. Firefox was times faster in re-drawing the screen and in smoothness of the scroll with the mouse wheel. I can’t stress this enough – Firefox faster redrawing makes browsing with IE feel like you are using a 600Mhz PC with 128Mb of RAM. I noticed that browsing the same pages from startup, IE had eaten up approximately 120% the memory Firefox needed.

Since I am a big fan of mouse gestures and that was the reason so far to use Firefox, I immediately checked if there us such an add-on for IE 7, and I quickly found one (hey, a point for IE, it has gestures at last) and installed it. And then came the frustration!!! As a long-time mouse gesture user in both Opera and Firefox I can surely say that I have never seen so poor implementation. It might be a result of the overall sluggishness of the browser, but the way I am doing gestures in IE I got about 40% correct gesture and 60% … the right click menu… WTF? For IE to recognize my gesture I had to do it very slow and distinct, while Firefox and Opera can recognize a gesture performed in just a few pixels on the screen. I am sure that the usability testing spent on the gestures was close to zero.

Quick tabs – that is a new, very nice feature in IE. Did I forget to mention IE has tabbed browsing now? I probably did, since it is a feature all other browsers have had for years now. Ok, so it has tabs, and has a feature that will tile all your tabs in a since screen allowing you to quickly see all the opened pages rendered, and you can switch to any tab by clicking on it. A really nice way to switch between tabs – love it!

Summary for IE7: Quick tabs are good, performance is awful, mouse gestures are awful, crashes frequently (when opening new tabs quickly 90% of the times it will crash)

Then I continued to install Firefox 2.0 RC1. Since I was frustrated with IE performance I tired this first – and the new Firefox is as fast and consumes as much memory as the 1.5 version. Everything works smooth and from the new features there is one that I instantly fell in love with – spell checking fields in forms. Before I used to write my blog posts in Word (just for the sake of spell checking) and then paste them in the blog. Right now, I type this post directly in the web-based editor, and my spelling mistakes are underlined in red. Sweet!

Summary for Firefox: Fast and light as always, spell checking is a great new feature!

That’s it – the verdict is more then obvious (and as a MS fan – I don’t like to admit it)
- Firefox is now even further ahead of IE