Firefox 2.0 vs. IE7 in Vista: How Close?

Some months ago, I was speaking with a hardware analyst on the subject of Intel's massive Core 2 Duo upgrades, and how deeply they'd put a dent in AMD's CPU plans. It has always been Intel's growth pattern, he said, to develop new product lines in giant fits and starts. Each one is massively more functional and important than the previous one, though it takes years for Intel to reach the next stage.

Meanwhile, he said, AMD grows incrementally, perfecting its fabrication process along the way, sometimes in baby steps, often in ways that aren't always readily perceptible by the consumer.

Microsoft and Mozilla could fit that same model. It's genuinely worth asking whether Firefox 2.0 should have been called 1.6. Its more intuitively organized Tools | Options dialog box is a welcome improvement, but all of its improvements are along those same lines.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's IE7 is a very different beast, now adopting Firefox-style "add-ons," though its list of available items at present is somewhat scant. (In the RSS Feeds category, you'll find NewzCrawler, which -- while it's a good product -- is a stand-alone program, not an add-on.)

The inspiration behind Microsoft's complete rethinking of the browser controls is sensible enough. In retrospect, I've realized that the menu bar is easily the single least used feature of my current browser, so IE7's elimination of that feature could be a welcome act. What replaces it, however, should be as organic and intuitive to the act of using the Web as Common User Access originally intended the menu bar to be for all manners of programs.

So far, I don't see the organic nature, the logical flow, behind Microsoft's choice of control locations. The little star on the far left doesn't mean "recorded URLs" (favorites) to me; and things like tucking the "New Window" menu command inside a toolbar button marked "Page," seems spurious and last-minute, as though a designer just realized this had to go somewhere.

It's these little facts that I realize the moment I return to my ordinary, seemingly unchanged Firefox environment, even in 2.0. It's a little more well-worn and comfortable, and that comfort is a critical part of organic use. It helps substantiate Mozilla's case -- were it to decide to make this case -- that maintaining a consistent look and feel is essential to ease of use.

With browsers becoming the inline handlers of multiple orders and classes of media, rather than just embellished HTML and XML, they are fast becoming the bookshelves and entertainment cabinets of our digital realms. As such, they start to cease to be exciting in and of themselves.

Perhaps this is for the better, unless you happen to be a company whose commercial livelihood is dependent on your browser's name recognition and commercial success. Thankfully, unless your name is "Opera," this is unlikely, because neither Microsoft nor Mozilla find themselves in that position.

But in the short term, at least, Mozilla may find itself with a serious problem: Part of the key to its relative popularity, at least among its user base, is the feeling it gives them of having advantages in performance, functionality and security. If Microsoft is generally perceived to have narrowed or erased that gap, the resulting lull in the usual buzz surrounding Firefox could effectively squelch that organization's principal means of advertising.

While Microsoft does have a lot to lose in terms of usage share, it has little or nothing to lose as a company. If IE7 were to fail in the public mind, it wouldn't be the first version of IE to do so, and yet here's Microsoft still standing.

Mozilla's current code-name for its alpha versions of Firefox 3.0 is "Minefield." The organization may need to start exploring a new path down that minefield pretty soon.