09.02.05
Tabbed browsing and IE
Some people may think I’m nuts, but Firefox wasn’t the entire solution to my web browsing desires. I played some with Deer Park as well and definitely think it’s a nice upgrade to Firefox, but some areas I still prefer Internet Explorer. Love it or hate it, the ability to host ActiveX controls is a beautiful thing in IE for the end user’s experience. Sure they can cause security holes, but the fact I have to restart Firefox (or Deer Park) every time I install a new extension is very, very annoying – especially if I have a whole bunch of tabs open.
Now, I’m beta testing IE7 at the moment and have been vaguely impressed with it (it’s better than IE6) but I can’t comment too much on it thanks to NDAs and EULAs and other fancy stuff. Although it does have tabbed browsing, I wanted to look for IE6 based solutions as well because tabbed browsing really is a good thing! So far I’ve tried Maxthon and Avant and both are fairly impressive but also very similar in their features and failures. My biggest annoyance of both browsers is the fact their tabs implementation leaves quite a bit to be desired – it’s more like an MDI environment where you can tile, maximize and do other stuff which isn’t necessarily what I want, especially when I accidentally tile my dozen or two tabs and have to fix it somehow.
The biggest gripe though of these two browsers is also the reason I was looking to a tabbed based IE – to support Onfolio, which I continue to use and love. Neither Maxthon or Avant will display the Onfolio bar for me, which makes them rather useless for a good replacement to IE or Firefox. IE7 has it’s own set of problems (which are mostly from the fact it’s beta and some sites don’t recognize the user agent yet). Still, I’m looking for more tabbed IE implementations to mess with so I’m sure I’ll report on more in the future.
Totally off topic, I’m still playing and enjoying Dungeon Siege 2, have tinkered more with my myriad of Flight Sims (love Falcon 4.0 even though the AI still pwns me) and am tinkering with some sports games to get my knowledge up to scratch so I can seriously compete in the Fantasy Football league! Life’s just too busy…