Monthly Archives: October 2006

I’ve been using Firefox as my browser of choice for ages but I still need to use Internet Explorer at work for testing the web sites we develop. The other day I installed IE7 for the first time and immediately hit a problem; it just would not run. It started up but while loading the home page it just crashed. Rebooting made no difference but a bit of googling revealed the cause. I use Google Desktop as my local indexing and searching solution and it seems that IE7 crashes if Google Desktop is set to index web history. Turning that off let IE7 get up and running.

Now what was it that I didn’t expect? As a long time Firefox user I’m quite used to the tabbed browser and will often do things like drag a URL from another program and drop it on the tab bar, but not on a tab, to open the URL in a new tab. IE7 has a cute little tab that functions as a new tab button and it seemed quite intuitive to me that to open a URL in a new tab you could drop it on this button. Unfortunately this did not seem to be an intuitive idea for the design team because it didn’t work, nor did dropping it on the tab bar’s background; with both of these actions opening the URL in the currently selected tab, precisely what I didn’t want. So here we have this shiny new browser but I still have to jump through hoops to do some things that have been around for a few years in other browsers; and people wonder why I prefer Firefox.