Installing Internet Explorer 7 versus Firefox 2: a personal journey.

daniel on Feb 21st 2007

Computer: AMD Dual Core 3.0GHZ something or other. 2 GB Ram. 7200RPM HD. Windows XP SP2, fully patched. AVG Antivirus. Windows Defender. Pretty clean install, only been running for about six months with very light usage.

Install Time

FF2: 40 seconds.
IE7: 11 minutes.

Successful?

FF2: Yes. Within minutes I had started it up and installed a new theme and a couple extensions.
IE7: No. IE7 told me that the install was “not successful”, but gave me no reasons. It suggested I restart my computer. Again.

Ease of Install

FF2: Opened the binary package. Selected the default options and agreed to the license. It installed with no errors.
IE7: Opened the binary package. Agreed to the license. Took 30 seconds to “validate my computer”. Asked me if I wanted to install a “malicious software removal tool” and the “latest updates”. Took five minutes to download and run those thing. Six minutes after that, the install exited and told me it wasn’t successful.

What I did after installing

FF2: Went to the Mozilla Add-on site, installed a few extensions and a new theme, and wrote this blog post.
IE7: Opened Firefox 2 to look at Microsoft’s suggestions on why the install hadn’t worked, which amounted to, “The gnomes did it. Beware gnomes.” I can’t find any cogent reason why the install failed. I can’t find any way to work around it. I can’t be arsed to continue on with this.

What I would have found if the install had gone right

FF2: Looks the same with a few tweaks under the hood, such as in-line spelling. Seems slightly faster than the last FF release.
IE7: Clone of FF1, except with a confusing new interface (why couldn’t they at least use the “ribbon” concept of Office?), and lots of buttons conveniently hidden around the screen, all of which do various different things, some of which even I don’t understand. No internal spell-checker. No internal add-on mechanism (that I can see). Options are labyrinthine. Oddly, it takes about as much time to open IE7 as it does to open FF2.

Why did I upgrade?

FF2: Because I like Firefox and I heard about the inline spellchecker, which basically sold me on it. Now, if someone would write an extension that could sync dictionaries between computers using nothing but my Gmail account, I’d pay them $100.
IE7: Because Internet Explorer 6 has been the bane of my IT existence for the last three, maybe four years. Nothing could possibly be worse than IE6, so when I heard IE7 had a “data broker” and sandboxed security and whatnot, it wasn’t a matter of whether to install it, but a matter of how quickly could I get it done and hopefully save myself a lot of headaches.

Why did I write this?

Because I am a satisfied Firefox user. Though I suppose if IE7 had actually installed properly, I might have been a satisfied IE7-on-the-side user. I guess we’ll never know.

Filed in main | 6 responses so far

6 Responses to “Installing Internet Explorer 7 versus Firefox 2: a personal journey.”

  1. # juleson 21 Feb 2007 at 8:23 am

    wow… um…. im trying to understand…. it seems that something didnt work the way you hoped it would… correct me if I’m wrong though… you have my pity anyways.

  2. # danielon 21 Feb 2007 at 11:52 am

    Sadly, my post wasn’t even highly technical.

  3. # juleson 21 Feb 2007 at 12:07 pm

    Ya well….. Julie hasnt had coffee in weeks… the point remains that I’m still sorry your little upgrade didnt work for ya.

  4. # Chris Hubbson 22 Feb 2007 at 8:11 am

    So far I have a 50% success rate on installing IE7. On my laptop, it installed flawlessly (of course ignoring the hideous “validation” steps you have to run and the multiple reboots). On my older desktop PC, it installed, but wouldn’t connect to the internet. Not only that, it killed the conduit to the internet for applications that try to go out for updates. I uninstalled and reinstalled; still the same. So I reverted to IE6.

    Actually, I guess that gives me a 33% success rate. :-(

  5. # danielon 22 Feb 2007 at 8:45 am

    I say if you have to revert to IE6, success == null no matter how you look at it :)

    d

  6. # Chris Hubbson 22 Feb 2007 at 9:47 am

    I concur. The only reason I’ll use IE6 is if some site won’t work with FF – but then, there’s always IETab, which fixes most of those problems. :-)