What did Firefox teach IE?

I love open source products. I love the way they branch out and provide competition for each other from the same base code. I love the way the software is generally released often and I love the way that user feedback is the driving force behind the majority of changes.

Now I have another reason to love open source software. It forces proprietary software to evolve… even against the will of the author of that software.

I have long contended that in the future when we speak of Firefox in a historical sense the only benefit we will remember will be that it made IE better. I just didn’t expect it this soon.

About 10 minutes after my first test drive with IE7 I spent some time staring blankly at the Firefox icon on my desktop. I hated to admit it, but Microsoft had out Firefox’d Firefox.

Read on for why I think that…

Firefox taught IE: Tabs

Sure, Firefox has tabs and they’re really useful. Firefox didn’t invent the idea, but they were probably the most widespread example of a tabbed browser. The tabs are functional and being able to open a folder of bookmarks into a series of tabs is exceedingly useful for me. Being able to right click on a tab and close all of the other tabs adds to this usefulness and is one of the commands I use most often.

Now Internet Explorer has tabs as well. The tabs are almost identical in functionality to the Firefox implementation. Double click on the tab bar for a new tab, press CTRL+T or even click the convenient New Tab button. Opening a group of favorites is also possible, again, almost the exact same functionality as Firefox. But then, there’s the Quick Tabs functionality. Click on the button on the left of the tab bar or press CTRL+Q and voila, you have a thumbnail of every single tab you have open. It goes away when you move the window… but that’s only a minor irritation. Just don’t move the window, instead click on the page you want to look at.

Firefox taught IE: Sidebar

Something a lot… and I mean a lot… of people talk about is sidebar approaches to presentation of separate but relative information. Vista is going to have one built into the desktop. Firefox took this to a slightly higher level with their support for RSS feeds directly in the sidebar (even further with Extensions that use the sidebar for various activities).

Internet Explorer has long had the ability to snap your favorites to the side of the browser. Now, however, there’s the familiar favorites star on the far left of the tab bar. This star displays your favorites in a fold-out, auto-hiding sidebar. So for those of us tired of giving up screen real estate to a sidebar but addicted to the functionality a sidebar provides there is now a solution! I’ve grown extremely addicted to this new functionality in a very short period. Definitely a win on this one for Microsoft.

Firefox taught IE: RSS

RSS is something just now beginning to catch momentum in a mainstream market. It is still someone obscure to general users, but the savvy folks out there love it. I’m one of those folks.

Firefox allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds which may then be loaded into the aforementioned sidebar. A feed acts a lot like a bookmark folder and displays the headlines for the feed as bookmarks. The functionality is nice, but it isn’t above some of the functionality I’ve seen from some open source applications dedicated to RSS feeds.

Microsoft decided to include RSS feeds in IE7. You can see where they looked at Firefox for ideas and then again put their own skew on them. Internet Explorer allows you to subscribe to a feed and display it in the sidebar. The way IE formats them is similar to Firefox, but the headlines are never displayed in the sidebar. Instead, the name of the feed is displayed and clicking on it opens the feed in a standardized, attractive format in the main window of the browser. Personally, I don’t find this as useful as the Firefox implementation as I would rather not have to scroll through what I consider irrelevant headline introductions just to read the headlines further down the list. In the case of most feeds, I would have been just as well off to have created a favorite to the site section hosting the news and just gone to it.

So while I like RSS support in both browsers somewhat, I don’t think either has it fully figured out yet.

Final Thoughts

I never intended for this to be a comprehensive review of Internet Explorer 7, but I did intend for it to be a quick look at what web developers may find immediately useful when moving from Firefox to IE.

I didn’t go into how Internet Explorer was faster in every way. I didn’t go into how Internet Explorer and Firefox still don’t agree on how cretain block level elements should be displayed. I didn’t go into how much it pains me to admit I would recommend a Microsoft product over an open source one. Or did I?

Either way, Internet Explorer is an awesome upgrade if you currently use an older version of it. If you use Opera and like it, stick there. If you use Firefox, give the new IE a shot. If you’re like me you won’t regret it.