virtualboy.

Being an RSS subscriber to David's feed, and having read the article, I feel that the quote you provide above (building on the contextotomy that was initally in this post) does sum up the review very well.  In my opinion, being honest, I completly agree with what David says.  I am an IE user.  I have been for most of my 'browsing' life, however, I have dabbled with other browsers, mainly for compatibility for websites in my University days, but, one I did spend abit more time with was FireFox, and if I were to compare IE6 with FireFox, in my opinion, I would have held my hands up and said that FireFox had a hell of a lot of useful features that IE6 didnt, it was quicker, yet, on the downside, because there were so many users of IE, many of the websites out there were written solely for IE, and this was one of the reasons I went back to IE.  I'm sure I'm not alone in this view.

I'm sure there are lots of Microsoft employees out there who would hold their hands up and say, we need to improve the browser more quickly, I mean, IE7 was a long time coming.  And fine, I agree, some of the features that are now new to IE have been in Opera, and FireFox for some time, but, putting that aside, like David says, Internet Explorer 7 represents a big, long-awaited step in the direction of modernization - we really have ramped up the security, the integration with Web Standards, and we are now including cool add-ons and much more.  I find IE7 a massive step up from IE6, and at least on a par with FireFox.  I love the amount of screen space I now have, I love the RSS integration and the way it sync's with Outlook, and I love the added security, especially the Protected Mode in Vista IE7.  I'll admit, I haven't used the new FireFox 2, but in terms of features, I'd say they are not far off equal.  We want users to have a choice of browser - sure, IE7 will be the default browser in Vista, but, the fact that we are working with the guys from Mozilla, to ensure interoperability, shows that we want people to have a choice.  If they don't want to use IE, use another, as they will work fine.

Everyone knows that IE needed to improve, and, as David says, with IE7, it has, and lets hope that the improvement continues, much quicker than it has previously.