Software Journal

Browser wars are over, in a way. Firefox at this point has a really strong following and the latest browser statistics show it neck to neck with IE 6 + 7. I personally use both, and I am a bit surprised that there are some essential features in Firefox, that IE lacks. I am not really sure if the IE team has not noticed these, or if they have decided not to implement those features for a reason.

• Ability to close a selected non focused tab. In Firefox, you can close the tabs other than the current one by clicking on that tab’s delete (X) button. In IE 7, you cant – you have to first move to that tab, and then close that one (the X only shows for the active tab). Both IE and FF have a “Right click -> Close other tabs” option though.
• Ability to highlight some text and search for it. In Firefox, you can select some text, right click, and do search (using whichever search engine is your default). No such feature in IE7.
• Ability to load bookmarks from one file. When moving between computers, it is so easy to move full firefox settings by simply copying the profile folder, or at least copying the bookmarks by using the file import export. No such option in IE7.
• Addons are very limited for IE. Granted that these addons are made by independent developers, but still, for an end user, this is an important advantage in Firefox.

Perhaps these features are coming in IE8, but that is still in beta.

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Posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 2:15 AM in review   |  RSS feed