I switched to Firefox for two reasons: tabbed browsing and adblock. But IE7 beta 2 was refreshed this week, and the rendering engine is supposedly complete. While IE7 doesn't have adblock, it does have tabbed browsing. Since I happily use whatever product works best (that is, I'm not religiously anti-Microsoft just because I buy Google), I downloaded the IE7 beta this morning.
But in the first 30 minutes of use, IE7 crashed an astonishing 11 times. It crashed while opening a new tab, it crashed while switching tabs, it crashed while scrolling a web page, and it crashed when watching a YouTube video. It even crashed when I wasn't doing anything - I'd stopped to answer the phone, and while I was talking, IE7 froze and required a ctrl-alt-del end task to recover. (This is on a modern machine, fast processor, 2GB memory, the latest Microsoft patches, and perfectly stable except for this.)
Now what I could see between crashes was exciting. The IE7 browser has a clean, spare interface and it feels much faster than Firefox or IE6. If it was stable, and if I could find a way to block all those banner ads that adblock invisibly removes, I'd switch back to IE today.
But Buygoogle isn't a Microsoft blog, or a Firefox blog, it's a Google blog -- why should the Google investor care about the instability of IE7? Because Google says Microsoft is their most dangerous competitor, and Microsoft execs throw chairs when they have to compete against Google. Vista threatens to funnel users to Microsoft's search engine for web searches, and it includes desktop search that could make Google Desktop irrelevant.
So if Microsoft's quality problems continue to push out the delivery of Vista, that gives Google a larger window of opportunity to scale and to deliver new innovations (and refine old innovations) that can level the playing field with Microsoft.
Google needs every week of delay that Microsoft will give them.
