Another area where IE7 has serious shortcomings is with add-ons that give extra features to the browser. Firefox has an incredibly rich community of developers creating extensions, and IE has nothing that comes remotely close to it. For reasons we'll get into in a minute, that's not likely to change any time soon.

How to find IE add-ons? Select Tools > Manage Add-Ons > Find More Add-Ons, or else go straight to the Add-Ons for Internet Explorer site. Unfortunately, most of the add-ons you'll find are for-pay, rather than free.

What's more, many of these so-called add-ons are not designed to work directly inside IE and integrate with the browser to give you a better browsing experience. In fact, a fair number of them have nothing really to do with IE, because they can work just as well with any competing browser, or work as standalone programs by themselves. They are nothing like the extensions that integrate into Firefox to extend that browser's functionality.

Finally, as a general rule, any add-ons that are designed to integrate into IE have not been specifically designed for IE7. That means, for instance, that as of this writing you won't find a single add-on that lets you customize the way IE7 tabs work.

Don't expect much to happen in the way of add-ons for IE7, at least for the foreseeable future. There are several reasons for this. A big one has to do with how add-ons are written. To write an add-on for Internet Explorer, you need to be a C programmer. To write an extension for Firefox, you only need to be able to write a script -- and there are far more people in the world capable of writing scripts than are capable of writing C code.