Firefox continues to work well here,

although it's true that I'm using 1.5.0.8 rather than version 2. I don't know what caused the crashing spate a week or so back, but I'm cautiously optimistic that it was something else. The thing is, I'm pretty much always running Firefox while my PC is up and running, so it's not easy to isolate stability problems. Actually, and I should think that this goes for a great many users, the PC is for me at least as much a machine for running a browser as anything else. Probably rather more so. This would explain my fixation with browsers then.

While I was having my fit of pique with the fox I took the opportunity to give IE7 a thorough thrashing, and indeed the latest Opera. I'm keen on Firefox, but I'm mercenary too, so if something better were to come along... I have to say that IE is really quite good these days, and there were only a few things about it that would prevent my using it all the time. The first was that there seems not to be any easily usable "find in this page" function, upon which I am heavily reliant in the fox. The second was that under circumstances where the computer was working hard - like having Second Life churning away in the background, IE took an age to switch between tabs where Firefox does not (too much). And thirdly, there are a number of little things I use extensions for in Firefox (change URL > current, DownThemAll et al) that have no equivalent in or for IE.

The Windows Live toolbar added a fair amount of useful stuff, and I do think the Onfolio add-in is pretty cool, perhaps the killer app for IE. Still, I'm foxing it still and hoping that they can sort a few long-standing silly bugs prior to ceasing support for the 1.5 branch in Februaury (I think it is). Opera remains a good tool, and very light-feeling. But as yet there's too much I can't do with it. Over and out. Just realized the time...