Ensight – Jeremy Wright

More than a year ago now, I was talking about how killer IE7’s tab implementation would be. While the internal tab manager I’d seen isn’t the same as the one that made it’s way to the public eye, many of the key features are still there.

So it’s kind of funny to see the new FireFox “feature list”. I put feature list in quotes both because most of these aren’t 1.0 to 2.0 type features. They’re incremental improvements. And the ones that aren’t? Have been in IE7 for more than 6 months.

Let’s review the list, according to Asa (he of the sharp tongue):

- Inline spell checking
- Search suggestions
- Search plugin management
- Session restore
- Phishing protection
- Improved feed support
- Improved add-ons management
- Bookmarks microsummaries
- Tabbed browsing improvements

I’ve bolded 4 of these. The search stuff’s nice (really, I’ve tried it), and I hope IE does something similar. The session restore’s been in the works for a while and is really just an extension making its way into the core build of FF. Beside that and “improved add-on management”, all of these features are already in IE7

Now I’m not slamming the FireFox team. Innovations in one browser that are actually useful should make their way into other browsers.

I’m simply pointing this out for 2 reasons:

1. Asa has famously decried IE’s phishing protection as (paraphrasing from one dinner with him) “useless, since it’s powered at least partially by static lists”. (of course it’s far more than that, but this was his biggest complaint when someone raised it as a cool IE feature)
2. Asa has publicly stated that IE7’s tabbed browsing is merely a copy/paste of FireFox’s. Of course, every one of the tabbed improvements in FF are ones from IE7. So not sure who’s copying who

At the end of the day, though, any declaration of anyone copying FireFox is funny, since FireFox is really just one big copy/paste from pre-existing browsers (largely Opera, to be fair) out there. It’s a nice browser and all, but those who live in glass houses eventually get pictures posted online of them walking around naked.

And really that’s all this is for. FireFox 2.0 is nice. No, I don’t think it’s worthy of a full x.0 release name (it seems to be largely for PR reasons). And yes I’m glad the features are being worked in.

But this isn’t some major, killer release. IE6 to IE7 is pretty substantial (though not perfect). FF 1.x to 2.0 is… Sad. I was, for months, hoping the 2.0 release would be fairly substantial. However it’s now becoming obvious that the FF team is realizing that they ultimately have two choices now that they’ve solved the “fundamentals”: get bigger or get smaller. Sadly, they seem to be trying to do both with each release. Minor improvements, with one or two “features” (often stolen copied from elsewhere).

They can really only do that for so long before folk realize they’re stagnating. Name one great new feature in FF in the last 12 months.