Preview: Microsoft's IE7 browser

OK, although the author still comes out in favor of Firefox, I have to take issue with a few things that she's said in her article:

Tabbed browsing: This nifty feature lets you have multiple Web pages up in one window. IE 7 also will let you save a group of Web pages as a "favorite."

Firefox also lets you save a group of web pages that are opened in tabs -- add SHIFT to your CONTROL-D combination (or select "Bookmark all tabs" from the "Bookmarks menu" and you'll be able to bookmark all open tabs in the current window. This feature comes in very handy, especially for corporations in specific industries, when you consider the following:

Home Page

Here you are able to specify the page (or tab group) that Firefox will show when you launch it or press the Home button. Enter the address in the Location(s) field.

Click Use Current Page(s) to use the page you're currently visiting. You can also use multiple home pages. If more than one browser tab is currently opened, this button will set the whole tab group as a start page.

To specify the home page(s) using a bookmark, click Use Bookmark.... You can even select a whole bookmark folder to be used!

For instance, if one were working for a law firm, Firefox could be set to open the firm's intranet page, a search page (google, perhaps, or Findlaw), and a page relating to the employee's work area (such as the web site for a law journal, for instance), all in separate tabs, as the "home page." Does MSIE 7 offer this ability?

RSS support: This feature is for gathering news feeds or links to news stories based on your preferences. IE 7 lists those news feeds in the browser window.

Firefox has had RSS support for some time (it creates RSS feeds as a Bookmarks folder). However, I've found Thunderbird's RSS/Atom support more useful, and more user-friendly.

It has a zoom function that adjusts text and images, so the Web page is scaled. Opera has that. Firefox doesn't.

There are extensions for Firefox that accomplish the same feat. CTRL-clicking with a mousewheel zooms the text (although not the image) size, and extensions for Firefox allow images to be zoomed as well. In fact, there are entire extensions devoted to dealing with images, including the ability to hide images, reload images (that failed to load upon initially loading the page), printing images, editing images, zooming images, etc.

I think that, as another blogger comments, even if Firefox doesn't come with IE 7's "dazzling new innovations" from Microsoft (tm), you can find extensions, free of charge, that let you accomplish the same tasks, if not more. And these extensions are, in essence, Firefox's trump card over Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Microsoft's IE7 browser preview fails to impress | IndyStar.com