Robert Scoble reports on his recent lunch with the Internet Explorer team. The IE team is looking for feedback as they design the next version, and they’re reading Robert’s blog. So if you have comments, now is the time to make them known.
My list is short: tabbed browsing, a better Favorites manager, full support for IE add-ins, and the ability to load 99.999% of all Web pages “in the wild” so I can use one tool for Web browsing.
Anyone who has used a browser that supports tabs can’t go back to the old IE. For the last year or so, I’ve been using MyIE2, which I enthusiastically recommend. (Steve Bass at PC World just came to the same conclusion, saying “My2IE looks and feels like IE but I swear–it does so, so much more. Tabs, built-in ad and pop-up blocking, and much more. It’s so good that I’ll be writing about it in PC World just as soon as I can.”)
Scoble’s article mentions an alternative called iRider, which is terrifically whizzy and slick. Instead of tabs, it uses a navigation pane along the left edge of the browser window. Unfortunately, it adds a separate preview icon for every page you look at. On many of my favorite sites, that makes navigation a nightmare, and it seems to break a few sites. Still, some great ideas there and I’ll keep experimenting with it in my spare time.
I’m surprised that out of 141 comments (and counting) on Robert’s blog, hardly anyone has mentioned Favorites. I use Powermarks, which doesn’t require any upfront categorization and supports full-text searching of my bookmarks collection. If the IE team hasn’t looked very closely at this app, they should. I’d love to see its functionality incorporated directly into the next IE.
What about Mozilla? Hey, I have it installed and I think it’s an amazing piece of software. But it simply doesn’t work on a few of the sites that I visit every day. Yes, that’s not the Mozilla team’s fault, but that’s the way the world is. And I don’t want to have to remember “Oh, this site doesn’t run with Mozilla so I have to open it with IE.” So I use Mozilla about 2% of the time.
Ed Bott 
Ed, you had recommended Avant Browser and now you seem to like MyIE2 better. Would you share the your view on this, listing the Pros and Cons.
Warren (WEH on TUG)
Interesting question! When I wrote about Avant browser last April, I noted that I was just trying it out, and that my observations were based on just a few days’ experience. I eventually stopped using it because I experienced too many problems, including some crashes and hangs. Since that time, the program has been updated extensively, and it might be worth my taking another look. But I’m satisfied enough with MyIE2 that I am not highly motivated to do so…
Yeeeahd, it’s csool