IE 7 should come with a warning...

IE 7 should come with a warning "To be used only in a super computer". Ok, that statement was bit of an exaggeration. But this is what I went through while installing IE 7 on a decently speced Toshiba Laptop.

• While I was downloading IE in the background, I just couldn't do any work in the foreground. The system just slowed down.
• The download was so big. It's strange, Microsoft's own IE is so big compared to the third-party browser Firefox.
• It took ages to load up for the first time
• It crashed while I was going through the initial configuration (once I loaded IE for the first time).
• When I am running IE it seems to bog the system down. Again, Firefox runs faster than native IE.

I haven't used it long enough to do a thorough review. But, I do like the slick new interface and the way it allow previews of the open tabs. I am not so sure about the ClearType (font smoothing). Some sites don't look good with font smoothing.

The oh-so-simple interface and the vast array of add-ons makes picking Firefox over IE a no brainer.

Another strange little reason why I prefer Firefox:
Long time ago someone thought me a very simple trick to beat the annoying and band-width hogging Flash ads embedded in the web pages. Find out the host name of the ad-server and add them to the host file and map it to the IP 127.0.0.1. This is a very simple way to block out the ads and hosts which drop tracker cookies.
This trick has a side effect in IE, if a page with embedded (blocked) ads is loaded in a browser, a DNS error will replace the ad space. This is expected as the adserver hosts are now being remapped to localhost [and I don't have a web server running on localhost]. But in IE, if I click back button it doesn't go back to the previous page. If the page has 5 blocked ads, I have to click the back button 5 times before I can go beck to previous page.
This issue doesn't exist in Firefox. Just one click will take me to the previous page regardless of number of ads blocked. Hmm.....