Internet Explorer 7 vs Camino 1.2+ showdown

I really wanted to do this comparison using video clips of the OS to show the differences and similarities side-by-side. I couldn't easily find a piece of software for Windows XP that would perform the same function as iShowU does for OS X.

The Internet informed everybody that Internet Explorer 7 was released today. I took some time to check out the changes that Microsoft had made with respect to tabbed browsing.

I really like the New Tab button at the right of the right most visible tab. It is a nice touch and it makes the benefits of tabs more obvious to new users.

When you scroll, you actually change the currently visible tab. I'm not sure what I think about this because is it always the case that you necessarily want to change the currently visible tab?

When you have the left most visible tab as the first tab that you opened, the scroll button is removed from the bar. When you have the right-most visible tab as the last tab you opened, the right scroll bar is visible... a little bit peculiar.

The tab list is quite nice. It uses highlighting to draw attention to which tabs are currently visible in the tab bar. I am currently working on bringing this back to Camino using separators to subtly denote which tabs are currently visible.

There is no click and hold scrolling of tabs - come on guys! The scrolling of tabs is not animated. This is something that people have been pushing for since the start in Camino.

The Quick Tabs button is very nice. It does exactly what I'd like to see Camino do but using Expose similar to Shiira. Also, it felt a little sluggish with 16 tabs on using Quick Tabs. I'm on a Core Duo 1.83 with 1.25GB RAM so I wouldn't expect that to be an issue. I wonder if they do it buy taking a snapshot of each page on the fly and arrange them into a matrix of images. That seems to be the way that Shiira does it considering the initial lag experienced when switching to Tab Expose. It's probably how I'd try to do it in Camino until Stuart told me that I was being a retard ;-)

I have to hand it to them that their product looks extremely polished compared to my summer work. It'd be quite interesting to speak with the people at Microsoft responsible for implementing this, I wonder if they read Blogger...