First let’s set aside the obvious fact that Firefox “defaults” to using Google, and no one complains about that. And then we can ignore the fact that Microsoft is the manufacturer of IE 7 and therefore somewhat entitled to give precedence to their own products. That leaves us with one slim thread holding up any credibility to Google’s concerns: that somehow, Microsoft is taking away a user’s “freedom of choice”.
I installed the IE7 beta on my computer earlier this week, and it *seemed* (on first glance) to be working fine alongside Firefox. But then I started noticing strangeness. My computer auto-rebooted several times due to failure of \WINDOWS\system32\lsass.exe, in one case involving the wdigest.dll module: this might be an indicator of several varieties of virus, but my machine scanned clean with the latest version of Avast, which is usually pretty reliable.
Microsoft is on its second beta of Internet Explorer 7, and they really want people to download and use it. I’ve been telling people who are having problems seeing my website “correctly” to use Firefox since IE 6 is full of CSS and DOM rendering bugs. IE7 will fix most of those problems, and the Beta actually looks reasonably good.
