[LINK] Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Day Zero: Better Than Firefox?

[Frank O'Connor]

Yo Robin,

At 3:28 PM +1000 on 19/10/06 you wrote:
>On 10/19/06, Deus Ex Machina <vicc at cia.com.au> wrote:
>>
>>Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Day Zero: Better Than Firefox?
>>http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/software/microsoft-internet-explorer-7-on-day-zero-better-than-firefox-208381.php
>
>IE6 SP1 download: about 75MB.
>Firefox 1.5.0.7: about 4.9MB
>Firefox 2.0 RC3: about 5.4MB
>
>Anyone have the download size for IE7?

Yeah ... it was about 15 Mb from memory.

>
>Functionally, Firefox compares very favourably.  Why is download size
>no longer compared in reviews?

 From my quick look at it ... IE now does text rendering (which makes 
the pages look so much nicer - almost the quality of the Mac rendered 
text), it has a whole new GUI (which was a bit confusing to me ... 
given the generic icons and the like, as well as the menu-bar 
separation between IE and your elected search engine), it may be just 
me but the tabs implementation sucks ... I much prefer the Mozilla 
verticalised approach, and it seems to take up quite a few CPU cycles 
to do what it does.

I'm guessing that it uses a lot of common IE6 libraries ... which may 
explain the relatively small size of the download.

Performance wise, it seems slower than IE6, it has locked up on me a 
couple of times (immediately after I changed settings and default 
specs), and the RSS implementation seems to work fine. Whilst the 
design/architecture is more modular than earlier versions of IE, it 
is in no ways as extensible or manipulable as Firefox, or any of the 
Mozilla browsers.

>
>Is bloat no longer a factor?
>
>I have seen security patches for IE6 that were bigger than the
>download size for Firefox.
>
>Do people not care anymore?

I don't care about size all that much anymore ... other than that a 
large size could indicate some inefficient design and coding, and may 
result in increased complexity and prospective points of failure. I 
mean 100 megabytes takes bugger all time to download on a broadband 
connection, and you barely notice the 15 Mb of IE7.

Just my 2 cents worth ...

					Regards,