Bloggeratto

VS

Both Browsers are now out and there was not a slaughter in any side of the fence.

The thing is that now that both of them are out, each one of the two sides has their great strenghs to set themselves apart from the other one.

And here is what is most importat for all Bloggers to know:

IE7

Five years it took for MS to finally decide that they needed to ship a new IE, and considering how much time it had passed and that now it´s a post Firefox Internet, of course that IE7 was never going to live to it´s hype, and i will tell you something even if you had already noted it or not:

I am a huge MS buff, i had never hidden it, but you all know that i always tell you the truth, and yes, IE7 is not way close to what IT SHOULD BE,but even then, it is enough,why?, becuase for over 60% of the population given the time that they have used it and that they don´t know firefox, it will seem like a gift from heaven.

And i am not guessing it, i have already seen the reactions to it, i own a cybercafe and i have upgraded IE6 to IE7 in all the computers and if you could see the faces and reactios it got, it sure seems like Microsft knew what it had going on.

Now, let´s talk about it´s strong points that truly make it a better experience than FF 2.0 to new users thst never knew firefx and now most never will:

Favorites

The way favorites work, they work very similar to a ditched feature FF 2.0 was going to have, and that was called spaces, however, the feature is way better done in IE7 for the simple reason that spaces was the response to IE6 favorites, MS should have looked at it, and then launched a dare to Firefox, and it was a dare they could not win over IE, becuase if one thing was always well done in IE was favorites.

Feeds

I don´t have a clue why firefox decided not to include a RSS reader, but i guess it had to do with the fact various extensions run in firefox to display RSS, and they decided not to rock the boat just yet, and boy if that was not a dumb move.

I mean, yes, Firefox has live bookmarks, but they are RSS tickers and not a proper reader, the best reader for me before i started to use Flock was Fizzle, fizzle used the live bookmarks system to then display the feeds, one of the most brilliant extensions in firefox.

And that kind of display is what inspired Flock own display and what surely inspired MS to do their own, a modest looking with two supporting features: the RSS discovery button, that is kinda of a mix of how it was done in Maxthon and how it is done in firefox.

And their own new features for it, a searcher, categorization and better rooting.

In IE7, when you add a feed, it will look as far as it can, passing what the default number of items must be actually in the feed, something i find way cool, you can filter it, and you can search the feed = brilliant.

It seems, not many people have played with IE7 long enough to admit how good this feature is.

Printing

Oh my god, i am sooo grateful for this new printing adjustable display to no end, as i say, i run a cyber cafe, and one of the most common things is when elementary school kids come to search for homework and they want to print.

The usual method is copying and pasting to Word, and then printing., well, not anymore, IE7 printing is for me THE BEST new feature in IE7 in the sense is an actual innovation, and never seen before feature in a browser in the way IE7 does it.

Two honorable mentions:

1.-the viewmatic expose

yeah, seen before by the foxpose firefox extension, but nice to see it out of the box.

2.-quick tabs.

a no brainer, before seen in a plug in from maxthon, and now added to IE7 and Firefox 2.0, because when you are like me that you get to open over 30 tabs....well, this is a great thing to have.

The things that went wrong

asynchronic support

strange behaveior with web 2.0 sites

CSS support

No opacity.... :(

Firefox 2.0

After a lot of changes, it finally arrived, and to the way i see it, in a out of the box experience it don´t lives to the hype either.

i really expected a integrated RSS reader, better favorites and something REALLY innovative that would just BLOW out of the water IE7, it didn´t deliver.

and that is why i think the cake redmond sent to the firefox team carries with:

"congratulations for the delivery, we are proud enough of what we did to send you a cake since yours will not defeat us"

If Firefox, had embarrassed IE7 beyond belief,we would have heard about it already, the most i can hear is "firefox is better", " i will not switch back" and "you should still try Firefox" wich translates in:

"we cannot longer find a way to sell you on firefox"

And the proof is that a month before IE7 shipped, IE got 5% back of it´s marketshare. starting november, IE7 will be sended as a mandatory update to over 100 million systems always connected to the update center.

But, what is what makes the grade in Firefox new features?:

Favorites

Improved experience, easier to use.

Advanced Updater

Updating something in Firefox, was never easier and more painless, this new updater is something to love, no more screw ups while updating your firefox.

Suggested search

Real time search suggestions, and better handling of search preferences make search in firefox win over that round.

Look

Even the default look of firefox, is now a pretty thing, no more bleak crappy look, and if you still dont like it, changing of skins is now even easier to do.

while preserving that default glossy look that is now all the rage.

Spell checking

Ok, this is it, this is the biggest new firefox feature, a integrated and pretty smart spell checker, that can sure be hackable and more advanced as time passes, too bad that it don´t added many sources right out of the gate, if i wanted to see just red underlinings everywhere, i only need to start up a word 2000.

Communities

Firefox community still has a better edge over IE7 new community and marketplace of addons, but the winds of change have already begun, with the new start ups, and some old you already see them servng a version of their previous firefox only extensions to IE7, one of the most notorious add ons just happened yesterday when Foxytunes said you could download IEtunes, something i am sure was a bad news to firefox, since is one of the top firefox extensions and even a recommeded extension.

I have already saw that 4 more of the firefox top ten extensionare going to release a IE version. so this marks a line where the only spoken is that firefox cannot rely on just that anymore, now that this has happened so soon after their firefox 2.0 launch.

WINNER?


None, and that is the problem, they are pretty much even out with each other.

It really don´t matters that IE7 fell short on standars, in real world web this don´t matters much, much less now that web 2.0 is being assimilated by the big 3 and most want to be bought instead of remain and thrive alone.

I wished that Firefox 2.0 really kicked IE7 ass so hard that it made MS to launch a inmediae fix in the standards front, just to cover face, but it didn´t happened, and now we are into a walked in situation:

We cannot, and we should not ignore IE7 while builindg our blog, we were able to do that while IE6 was out becuase we wanted people to use other browsers very badly since IE6 was obsolete, now they won´t change to other as their default experience.

I on the other hand don´t have much problems with it, i use 3 browsers ,side by side, Flock as my main browser, that really is way better than both of them but that is not a mainstream browser to say the least, it´s a savy/geeky user browser with a web 2.0 twist.

then IE7 since everything MS run better in it and Opera 9.0 becuase i like it as reference for both browsers.

Now What?

Now, you just make your own conclusions about the two products.

i do must say that in the end, it will be good that there is now a real competition again, and that more RSS users, mean more readers in our Feedburner stats.

I have decided that i will support IE7 as much as i can in Bloggeratto, because i alreay checked the stats in my blog and IE went up 30% with my visitors.. if you ask how many were using mozilla before IE7 launch?, a more than great 75% AVERAGE and now IE is winning again...so....that is why i tell you to support it in you blog.