Helmers

After months of abuse, I decided to start clean today, and re-installed Windows Vista. Since I can't prevent the installation of Internet Explorer, I decided to give it a go. Millions of people use it every day, how bad can it be.

I figured I would take advantage of some of the "advantages" of not using Opera, and installed the Google Toolbar. I don't know if this is what caused my problems, or if these are actual bugs in IE, but after a while, I started having browser crashes. Since it doesn't save my tabs, I got frustrated. For some reason, there also were rendering bugs. Add to that the general impression of the browser being slow, there was really no other choice. Back to Opera.

For roughly an hour I endured Internet Explorer, and during that time it really managed to leave a bad impression. The only upside was that audio/video playback worked right out of the box. I hope my experience were due to bad luck, because on a clean install I would expect Internet Explorer to be rock stable.

At least it serves a reminder as to why I use Opera.

PS: Tried Firefox too, both the latest official and the nightly, but didn't like it.

I just installed IE 7 (2. beta) on my new laptop, it automatically subsribed me to their development blog, and there I came across this post, where Microsoft states that ClearType, or subpixel font-hinting, is improving reading speed as well as reading comprehension.

As a long time ClearType advocate, I am glad they made this decision.