Silicon Valley Musings

I have been using Firefox for a while now. The killer features are the tabs and Google’s Toolbar. But since I upgraded to version 1.5, I have found it a bit buggy. It crashes fairly frequently. And after several hours of use, it picks up the annoying habit of ignoring the resize of the window which renders My Yahoo! and Gmail unusable.

So I decided to download the IE 7 beta. I will save the full IE critique for another day. The surprising thing is the killer feature of IE 7 is not tabs, but ClearType. It really improves the overall readability, Microsoft claims by five percent.

You can really see the difference. The attached screenshot fragments show the same Web page rendered in Firefox and in IE 7. The addition of ClearType and tabs might just bring be back.

UPDATE: My friends, Nic and Tom, from Reuters point out that ClearType is a Windows XP feature. All IE 7 is doing is ignoring the “Display Properties, Appearance, Effects…, smooth edges” setting. See this IEBlog post for details.