IE7, like IE6 before it, will ask you over and over again to OK ActiveX controls or scripted features on Web pages. Even if you visit the same page every day for a year, you'll still be brought up short and asked to approve a Web-based process. It doesn't let you disable many of its security "features" by specific Web page.

Back to my Web host control panel example, I didn't know exactly what kind of script or code was trying to launch. All I knew was that I'd been launching it with no problems in Firefox for months. So, that left me guessing at security levels and settings I should "turn down" in IE's Security settings tab. After two or three attempts, I gave up and reverted to Firefox. Did I bother to crank back up IE7's security settings? If not, the browser is probably more vulnerable, thus defeating the whole point. This was the exact reason why I dumped IE6. I got fed up with security functionality whose user experience was, in a word, ridiculous.

On the plus side, IE7 loads Web pages quickly. It is at least Firefox's equal in my informal tests (each browser loaded some pages faster than the other). Perhaps IE7's best advantage over Firefox is how quickly it launches. IE7 loads several times faster than Firefox. Mozilla supporters may say that's because Microsoft loads a good part of IE's code into Windows. I was no big fan of Microsoft's past insistence that IE could not be separated from the Windows code. But about the argument that it constitutes an unfair advantage, my thought is: So what? I just want a browser that starts up quickly. Mozilla can do better on that score.

But nothing's really changed about the differences between IE and Firefox since the release of Firefox 1.0. In an initial review of Firefox 1.0, I wrote:

More than anything else, this is the smartest aspect of what Mozilla has done with Firefox: It's a realistic browser, a worthy successor to the Navigator line. It's a browser that inspires an emotional response. You don't have to learn to like it with your left brain; you just like it.