Last year, Microsoft released the first beta of Internet Explorer 7. Since I had access to it through the Longhorn + IE7 technical beta program, I started using it as my primary browser so that I would be in a better position to send in feedback and bug reports. Several months later, Beta 2 was released to the general public - a huge improvement over IE6, with lots of new features and a much more standards-compliant rendering engine. I would have never considered going back to IE after my experiences with Firefox, which I had been using since the Phoenix days, but I kept an open mind and waited until Beta 2 was released so that I could get a complete picture of what IE 7 is going to look like when it's released later this year.

Today, I'm going back to Firefox, because IE 7 hasn't given me a compelling enough reason to switch. Don't get me wrong - there are a number of features in it that I really like (Quick Tabs being one of them), but almost every one of them can be reproduced in Firefox using a handful of freely-available, lightweight extensions. Most IE addons, on the other hand, are either not free, or simply don't have the same kind of tight integration with the browser that Firefox extensions do. I think that's been one of Firefox's biggest strengths - the massive repository of user-contributed extensions that add value to an already excellent browser.

Sorry IE, you've lost this round. Better luck next time though!