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IE7 downloaded 3 million times; Firefox 2 launches today

By Vivek Puri | October 24th, 2006 at 09:50 am ET         

According to IEblog, three million copies of IE7 were downloaded in the first four days after the official release of the upgraded browser. Millions of more users will be receiving IE7 as part of regular windows updates within next few days. Looking at the stats for IE competitors, Firefox was downloaded 2 million times within the first 36 hours on the launch of  Firefox 1.5 in November 2005. It yet to be seen how the numbers for Firefox with look after its official release of v2 today at 6PM Pacific time.

All the browser upgrades have added great value over time, but personally for me any one of those browser being all-in-one solution is still a dream. I started off using IE, and moved over to Firefox for the tabs feature. One day Firefox on my machine does not want to come up anymore. Tried uninstall, reinstall, safemode, but nothing worked. Feeling frustrated I downloaded Flock, which has the same code base and similar features as Firefox. Everything was back to normal until I experienced severe memory leaks with Flock. Also I needed to login to 2 Google accounts simultaneously which is not possible from the same browser. To overcome these issues, I downloaded Maxthon for my second Google account and back to IE for regular use. Did the problems end here? Not really!

Maxthon is a great browser, very fast, but a bit different in few features. Take the case when you press the F2 key. Typically in IE and Firefox, F2 means edit mode, however in Maxthon you end up switching browser tabs. Also if you want to create a new tab in IE7 you will hit Cltr+T, whereas in Maxthon it is Cltr+N. Just couple of issues but they make your daily task difficult in case you have to switch between browsers frequently. Apart from these issues, IE7 has been eating up more than 500 mb memory if 5-6 tabs are open simultaneously. So, do I have an optimal browser after all the upgrades, releases, and new features? Forget about me, just imagine how web developers cope up with all these different browsers.

Links:
Internet Explorer
Firefox

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