Marketing Pilgrim has an interesting article using some creative queries to try to suss out what people think of Firefox and IE. Interesting results :-)
link via pkim.
update: and Marshall expresses his agreement.
Posted by: browserden | January 8, 2007 7:02 PM
One of my pet peeves with IE7 is that you can't move the toolbar buttons to where you want them...
Posted by: David Naylor | January 9, 2007 9:50 AM
And to comment the topic at hand... yes, very interesting results.
:D
Posted by: David Naylor | January 9, 2007 9:57 AM
I've always been leery of the "Googlefight" method of research. There's too much room for things like "Open-source zealots claim that Internet Explorer sucks" or "Joe Schmoe says that Firefox sucks; here's why he's wrong" to trip up the results. Though re-reading the post, I see Marketing Pilgrim was careful phrase his own post to avoid misleading future searches of the same sort.
At first glance, the "uninstall" searches look more telling. But then, there's the fact that Firefox is easier to uninstall than IE. While some people will search first, many will just open up control panel and uninstall it successfully. With IE, you'll have people opening up control panel, not finding it (or uninstalling IE7 and finding IE6 is still there), then going online to find out what they need to do.
Posted by: Kelson | January 9, 2007 10:03 AM
I should add: I agree entirely with the sentiments expressed!
Posted by: Kelson | January 9, 2007 10:32 AM
I have to say it's the UI that I think was the biggest mistake in IE7. There's just no excuse for pushing something so radically different as part of an OS upgrade.
Mozilla made a lot of effort when designing Firefox to make it familiar enough to IE6 users, the buttons were in the locations expected, the keyboard shortcuts are mostly the same and the menubar is in the expected location.
IE7 broke the rulebook, some buttons (reload, stop) are now in a different location, the menu bar is not there by default and if you activate it then it's in the wrong place and worst of all the buttons that were supposed to replace the menu bar take up valuable space on the tab strip.
I did (and still do) think IE7 is better than IE6 but I did warn about the non-standard UI when writing my initial review (a week with IE7), that review was written after I used IE7 exclusively for a week. More recently I've been using IE7 alongside Firefox for some work related testing and when using them side by side my opinion of IE7 has dropped too, it feels very much like a rushed product that is not refined (like the Zune).