I Can't Quit the IE Habit
I repaved my machine a week or so ago and was going to try and force myself to use Mozilla as my primary browser, once and for all. And then I fell right off the wagon again--this time with C/2-type velocity, I didn't even get to the install. Well I did, but much later and only for testing pages in it and only after I had given myself up to the fact that I am inexorably stuck as an IE user.
Why is that, I ask myself? Well it's the little things and it's habit, I suppose. I am addicted to being able to fly around urls in the address bar with keyboard shortcuts, I'm addicted to having it be familiar and integrated everywhere. In fact, it's so familiar and natural to me after all these years, I really only have three significant quarrels with it:
1.) Lack of built-in pop-up blocking. Seriously, I wonder aloud--how in the hell does anyone manage to use IE without a pop-up blocker of some kind? This along makes me yearn to break the IE habit. How it is that it's 2003 and Microsoft hasn't delivered a browser with the ability to kill unrequested pop-up windows is dumbfounding. If this isn't in IE7, that's it, I'm switching to OS/2 errr Linux err OS X. Something. In the meantime,
AIEPK seems to be the lightest thing around that does a passable job as an add-on.
2.) Tabbed browsing. I can live without it, but it'd be nice. I really dig the ability to launch a new window from a URL in the background. It's just cleaner experience-wise. There are add-ons or IE-hosts that do this, but they're a bit clunky and I've never really mad it past the second day with one of them.
3.) Standards support. If you author pages with IE forced into standards compliance mode it does a pretty decent job relative to Mozilla and Opera. In some ways I think it actually does better than Opera, at least from my experience throwing tags and selectors together. But there are omissions from CSS2 that really bring it all to a thundering halt. Lack of min-height/width drives me batty regularly.
Maybe there's more, these three alone haven't been enough for me and I don't buy normal FUD or the reverse varietal. I haven't seen anything about IE7 anywhere, I don't even know if that's an actual product--but man it better make up for lost time or I'm going to be majorly peeved. (My degree of peeved-ness is generally considered to be a major concern to most of the Fortune 50, or so I've convinced myself.)