It's been a few days. In that time, I upgraded to Firefox 2 Beta 1. It also locked up on most starts, requiring me to kill it in Task Manager. So, I decided to fix the problem since it was obviously not the browser.
I created a new profile, copied my bookmarks, cookies, passwords, etc. over one-by-one, and then manually installed the extensions that I use most. Since doing that, I haven't had any odd behavior. So, there's obviously something busted with my old profile. I have no idea what that problem is, but at this point, I'm just happy having a stable version of Firefox.
So how's IE7? It's quite nice, actually. Speedy, tabbed, and very usable. It took some convincing to make it work with my favorite desk bar (
Dave's Quick Search Deskbar) due to some security changes, but that was the only hurdle, other than the first install problems mentioned in my last post.
After using them both for the past several days, however, I think I've decided to stay with Firefox. I like extensions. IE lacks anything like it. Additionally, I find IE's title/header area too bulky. I don't know why I can't dock the address bar, menu bar, and tab bar/tool bar into just 2 bars in total. The third bar chews up space for no good reason.
I do like the Quick Tabs preview feature of IE7, but the same feature can be added to Firefox via a browser extension like
foXpose.
They're both on their way to being great new versions. I would like to see IE7 do something radical to the browser like Firefox, Opera and the rest did in their own way, but I don't think we'll be seeing that in this release.