I’m not going to lie about it: I’ve always been an IE guy. I switched from Netscape back when IE 4 came out and never really looked back. Sure, I’ve tried others but never really saw enough to make me want to switch. When IE 7 was released with tabs (finally!) I thought I’d never stray.

Then came Vista. Again, I’m not going to lie: IE 7 under Vista blows. The crashes are annoying enough (at least twice a day) but the pauses! The pauses are driving me insane! It’ll just sit there, spinning it’s wheels for no apparent reason for up to a minute at a time. I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been patient. I started using Vista at home when it was RTM back in November of 2006 (several months before it’s early 2007 public debut.) I suffered through the nVidia driver blues and the bizarre software incompatibilities. I even put up with the UAC. Well, for about two days but hey, that’s a long time! I’ve even resigned myself to work around the file copy issues until they can fix them (robocopy to the rescue!) I tried every fix out there for the IE issues, but even with a clean install on a 4-core opteron (2x dual core) workstation with 3 gigs of RAM and a kick ass video card, it still took coffee breaks on nearly every page load, new tab, or refresh. Did my damn browser join a union?!

It’s been over a year now, and still IE 7 freezes up and, well, I’ve had it. On a lark I installed Safari and I have to say, I really like it. To understand why, we have to go back to the release of IE 4. Before IE 4 I used Netscape, and before that Mosaic. Back then Netscape made what I believe was a fatal move: they started to bloat their browser into what would become Netscape Communicator. It wasn’t a web browser anymore. It was a news reader, an email client, a webpage editor, it sliced, it diced, and it did it all rather poorly. At the same time, IE was, for the most part, going the other way and staying focused on being a web browser. That was the reason I moved to IE then and it is the reason I’m moving to Safari now. Safari doesn’t try to be what it’s not. It’s a browser, plain, simple, and fast. Most important it does what IE 7 can’t: it performs well under Vista.

So Microsoft has not only managed to drive me crazy with what is quickly turning into Windows ME 2.0, they have driven me into the arms of another browser. Microsoft should count themselves lucky that I can’t (legally) go out and install OS X on any old PC, or it’s quite possible IE wouldn’t be the only MS technology I’d be breaking up with right now…