Yep. You read that right. I know, everywhere else you're reading that Firefox is soooo much better, and that people are switching to it in droves. For me that was three years ago, but now I'm going back.

I'll admit that I don't rag on Microsoft anywhere near as much as other people do. I just don't hate them merely because they're big and control the majority marketshare of desktop and notebooks PCs worldwide, nor do I despise them because Mac people say I should.

That doesn't mean I "love" everything Microsoft does or every product they make. For example, one thing I idn't like was Internet Explorer, which (at the time I originally switched to Firefox) had stagnated at version 6 for quite some time. And I didn't look back... even when Microsoft (finally) added things like tabbed browsing in IE 7. I was happy with Firefox, and though I've used IE for various things over the past few years, it's never been my browser of choice... until today.

I'm doing something I never thought I'd do.... I'm switching back to Internet Explorer. More specifically, Internet Explorer 8.

I'm doing it for one reason, crash recovery. Not 30 minutes ago I lost about 2.5 hours of work because another tab I had open crashed, and as is the case with Firefox, means everything goes down. 

I know, I know. "Yada yada, save your work. Yada, yada it's my fault." Fine, I should have saved what I was doing when I had to switch over to that other tab and attend to something else. You're right, I probably should have had less tabs open. I get it. Still, why on earth does one tab have to bring down every other thing I have open? Why can't I close and restart a single tab?

It looks like Microsoft heard this one before, because a new part of Internet Explorer 8 is a new approach to crash recovery. Most importantly (to me anyway), is that IE 8 supposedly runs tabs in their own process (or tries to depending on your system's performance). This means that if a tab crashes in IE8, it shouldn't affect every other tab open. 

I'll even be the first to admit that this isn't a 'mission critical' feature for basic web surfing; it's not like you can't navigate back to whatever page you were looking at. However, anyone that is writing on the web (and since it seems like everyone has a blog these days, so that's quite a lot of people), it sure sucks when your post is lost because you loaded up a funny video in another tab.

So, if it works like they claim, I won't be going back to Firefox... at least until they can match this one feature. Who knows, maybe not even then. I tend to stick with whatever is working, even if it has some things that annoy me.

If it doesn't work, then back to Firefox I go, because at least it doesn't make that annoying click sound every time I hit a link. 

(Expect my next blog entry to be "Things about IE that still drive me crazy.")

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