On the other hand, at least IE7 has a Feeds area of its sidebar panel that it defaults to. If you opt to subscribe to an RSS feed using Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature, you're left to your own devices as to where you store them in Bookmarks. People new to Live Bookmarks sometimes have a disconnect at this point. The notion of saving feeds as bookmarks is not as clear-cut as it may seem.

More importantly, IE7 is using its feed viewer to render subscribed feeds so that you see headlines, links and descriptions for each feed. Firefox's Live Bookmarks creates a separate bookmark for each story offered by the feed. That's very cumbersome, and not a useful way for people to work with RSS. In addition, with IE7, you can sort that long feed of entries by date, title, author, and so on, plus you can filter by category. Where Live Bookmarks is a placeholder for something better, IE7's feed reading tools attempt to be your main RSS reader -- and for many people, they'll be enough. (Not for your author, however, who prefers FeedDemon.)

If you're a confirmed RSS user who already uses an external program or service, you may find that you like Firefox better. If you're still dabbling with RSS feeds, or use them occasionally, IE7 has the right solution. It should be noted that RSS-reading Firefox extensions like Sage and others work similarly to IE7's feed reader.

Web search tweaks

Mozilla changed some things about your access to Web search engines in Firefox 2.0. The Search box is no longer limited in size, and it takes up all the available space wherever you place it.