IE7 vs. Firefox: The Competition Really Begins

It's been a busy couple of weeks in the browser market, with Microsoft finally "shipping" Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla making its Firefox 2.0 final.

Of course, both browsers have been around for a long time in beta versions, but it's good to see them finally considered ready for everyone. I've been using both a lot over the past couple of days, and they are nice improvements.

Internet Explorer 7 shows a bigger set of changes, but that's to be expected, since it's been years since IE 6 came out. The browser finally adds tabbed browsing, making it the last significant browser to do so, along with anti-phishing controls, integrated RSS reading, and an ability to much more easily manage add-ons and active X controls.

I particularly like a couple of ease of use features, notably its zoom capability, and the Quick tabs button, which lets displays thumbnail versions of your open browser tabs at the click of a button.

Firefox 2 isn't as big of a change, but it also adds a number of new features, such as putting the button to close a tab on the tab itself (rather than the far right hand side of the tabbed bar), anti-phishing features, a spelling checker, a session restore feature (for getting back to a whole group of open tabs") and an undo close feature. While a few of the old extensions don't work, most seem fine.

My favorite new feature is probably the spelling checker, which is very helpful when you're filling out or typing in a web form. This worked really well for me.; and I can imagine it improving the spelling on blogs all over the web. I also like the way Firefox integrates an RSS reader, but also lets you easily choose among some alternatives.

In my tests, both browsers had some nice features and pretty good compatibility with the web sites I tried. Even most of the complicated AJAX-based sites worked pretty well. But I did run into some problems.

IE 7 doesn't work properly on the Community Server site where I create this blog, which is a major problem for me. Yahoo Mail beta gave me a warning about an unsupported browser, but seemed to work fine. Firefox was better on the sites I tried, with it not working only on a few MSN sites (such as administering an OfficeLive web site).

Of course, one can blame the software behind these sites as much as the browsers, and that's a real issue. We all like new features, but it would be great if every site and every browser just worked together. (I've had even more problems with Opera 9, even though that passes some of the compatibility tests out there, which just proves we need better tests.)

In my normal surfing, I haven't yet come across anything marked as phishing in either browser, but that's probably me. But I'm glad to see both browsers doing things here, as it may be the biggest issue facing browser users these days.

If I had to choose just one browser, I'd stick with Firefox, in part because it was more compatible for me, and in part because it has a couple of features I found myself using a lot, especially the spelling checker. I also like the idea of portable applications, which you can run from a USB memory stick, which I expect will be out shortly for Firefox 2 (betas are available now.)

But in practice, I'll probably keep both browsers around because not everything is compatible with any one browser these days. That's a shame, because the whole point of the web is to be able to link to any site and be able to use it.

For now, though, it's great to have two competitive browsers out there (or really three, because I'd include Opera 9 in the list). Competition is leading all the browser developers to push forward and make their browsers do more, be more secure, and get easier to use. That's good for all of us.

PCMag.Com

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2006 IgNobel Prize Winners

Research into stinky feet, a study on the sound of fingernails on a blackboard and a device that repels teen-agers with an annoying high-pitched hum on Thursday won IgNobel prizes -- the humorous counterpart to this week's Nobel prizes.

Other winning research included a U.S. and Israeli team's discovery that hiccups could be cured with a finger up the rectum and a study into why woodpeckers do not get headaches.

"The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology," said Marc Abrahams, editor of the science humor magazine "Annals of Improbable Research," which sponsors the awards with the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.

All the research is real and has been published in often-prestigious scientific and medical journals. However, unlike the Nobel prizes awarded this week by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, IgNobel winners receive no money, little recognition and have virtually no hope of transforming science or medicine.

Even the name of the award, a play on the word "ignoble," is meant to be deprecating.

But they receive their awards from real Nobel winners in an event broadcast on the Internet at http://www.improbable.com on

Thursday evening.

Some of the 2006 IgNobel winners:

-- BIOLOGY - Bart Knols of Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands, the National Institute for Medical Research in Tanzania and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria and colleague Ruurd de Jong for showing that the female Anopheles gambiae mosquito, which carries malaria, is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.

"We have shown that three different Anopheles mosquito species prefer to bite different parts of a naked motionless volunteer and that this behaviour is influenced by odors from those body regions," they wrote in their report, published in the Lancet medical journal in 1996.

-- ORNITHOLOGY - Ivan Schwab of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for explaining why woodpeckers do not get headaches.

-- NUTRITION - Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.

-- PEACE - Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing a teen-ager repellent -- a device that makes a high-pitched noise that is annoying to teen-agers but inaudible to most adults; and for later using the technology to make cellphone ringtones that teenagers can hear but not their teachers.

-- ACOUSTICS - D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand of Chicago's Northwestern University for a 1986 experiment aimed at discovering why the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard is so irritating.

-- MEDICINE - Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine and the team of Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Centre in Haifa, Israel who both published studies entitled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage."

-- MATHEMATICS - Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation, for calculating the number of shots a photographer must take to almost ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.

Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

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