I've installed both Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1 and Mozilla Firefox 2 Beta 2 and have been bouncing back and forth to see which one holds up better with my day to day workload. I am a long time Firefox user, but I just had to compare the latest browsers to see which one is the best. Both are huge improvements over the previous major versions as well as their previous beta versions (Firefox 2 Beta 1 crashed all the time, and IE 7 Preview Release was slow as molasses).
With these latest releases, it's a whole new ball game. I can't really decide now which one is better; they both look great, both behave nicely, and both handle very nicely the ajaxy goodness that we've all come to love. For the most part, they have the same general feature set; they both have tabs and they both have extensions (IE calls them Add-Ons) which where the main differences before.
IE 7 definitely has the best feed support with a pretty decent feed reader built in. In addition, this feed reader has nice integration with Windows Vista feed features like the sidebar feed widget AND with the Windows Live Desktop Mail software so any feeds you subscribe to in IE will show up in various other places too. This is a screenshot of the feed reader in IE7 with my subscriptions on the left and the articles from the Never Done feed on the right:
You can filter the feed, see the categories, and search it all from the far right box thingy. Not bad MS, not bad at all.
Firefox doesn't really compare when it comes to the feed reading, they still have live bookmarks which are pretty much useless:
Now the thing that Firefox really has going for it is performance. The latest version seems to be lightning fast! UI response is instant, ajax apps respond much better than ever before, and page loading seems to be a lot faster. For this reason alone, Firefox takes the lead. Firefox also has more extensions to choose from (but I'm not really counting that, because I'm sure that will change when IE 7 comes out of beta). And the little search as you type feature in Firefox, I really can't live without:
Until next time, Firefox has still has my vote.
