Why I hate Internet Explorer today

Truthfully, I should have posted this Tuesday, while I still had fresh feelings of rage and anger. Luckily, I had my handy-dandy small yellow pad and took notes.

I hate IE because:

It doesn't have tabbed browsing. I have loved tabbed browsing since I started using it. According to the Wikipedia, the first browser with tabs came out way back in 1994, with a browser called "InternetWorks." (Never heard of it.) I first heard about and started using tabbed browsing with an early version of the Mozilla suite (the Wikipedia puts me using version 0.9.5 circa October 2001). I also used this delightful technology in Konqueror (KDE on Linux), Firefox (Most modern platforms), and Safari (Mac OS X). This means that I have used tabs in my browsing habits for nearly five years now. Since IE currently does not support tabs (allegedly in IE 7 for Windows Vista, Real Soon Now), I can't use many of my work habits. This leads to stress and inefficiency. Also insert rant about screen real estate.

IE is ugly. No getting around this. IE in XP looks like Playskool. You can't change it, since:

IE doesn't really support Extensions. I know this is not wholly true. You can get all sorts of nifty toolbars for IE from Adobe, Google, Yahoo! and so forth- these don't change the functionality or UI of IE as understood with Firefox extensions. And no, spyware doesn't count.

IE doesn't have Find As You Type. Yet another Firefox feature that you'll wonder how you lived without. Basically, if you type in a window, the app assumes that you want to search within the page you're viewing. This saves keystrokes. For me, this just runs in my brain as the way I think. There's no second of hesitation to hit whatever keystroke starts a Find dialog (how passe). From brain to fingers to results. (Note that Safari doesn't have this either. Opera does.)

It's old, it's insecure, it's proprietary, it doesn't follow standards. I feel like I've sufficiently beaten this dead horse.

I haven't regularly used IE since winter of the year 2000- maybe earlier. I feel like I'm taking a huge step backwards- sort of like going to an automatic transmission after using a stick shift.