- IE7 doesn't pass Acid2 either (and won't, see ieblog)

- Acid2 isn't done by w3c, but by "Web Standards Project" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2

There is only one feature that makes Firefox better than IE7 for many, many people: Extensions.

There is no easy way to develop cool extensions for IE7. I'm talking about add-ons like Adblocker and ScrapBook. ScrapBook is my new favorite Firefox extension, I don't know how I lived without it before. Also GreaseMonkey and SourceForge Direct Download.

These kinds of add-ons do not exist for any other browser because no other browser offers a simple way to develop these extensions easily. For instance, to build an extension for IE, you have to know C++, you can't just use Javascript as you can in Firefox.

I've used IE7 on Vista for _months_ and thought it was a great browser until I tried Firefox 2.0.

- Firefox has extensions (see http://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/extensions/). IE doesn't have anything close to that. My personal favorite: Adblock.

- IE's security settings are just downright confusing. I have no idea what most of them mean, or if I'm actually secure.

- IE information bars come up often, and there's at least one case where I can't figure out how to stop it (disable downloading signed ActiveX controls). This reminds me of the IE6 ActiveX message box ("ActiveX is disabled. This page may not display correctly.") Very annoying, very good reason to ditch IE.

- Disabling the popup information bar results in... a popup in the status bar.

Good things about IE7:

- On Vista it runs in Protected Mode.

- It properly scales to high DPI (120 DPI).

- The initial UI is cleaner. I actually like the absence of the menu bar, and the address box and tabs are larger. However, there's a Firefox extension to collapse the menus into one menu item. I believe the control sizes can be adjusted via some XUL.

- Network deployable, Group Policy configuration.

Overall IE7's Protected Mode is the main reason I'm even considering using IE on Vista. The UI points aren't that big, as extensions have shown Firefox's UI to be very flexible. And network deployability is negated by community-developed MSIs, and Group Policy configuration is something I only need with IE because I'm not comfortable with its default security settings (because I don't know what most of them mean).

Mayank, instead of merely reading reviews, give Firefox a try. Run it, use it as your primary browser for a while, try some of the extensions. Otherwise you're in no position to compare IE and Firefox.

All what I want from IE as a user is a spell-check and better page search, I want the Microsoft Word spell-check and grammar check capabilities in IE, and I want to highlight what I am searching for (in the page), if I press on F3 and search for something, I should have all the page highlighted with what I searched for.

Not only that, when I click on the next page, my local search will still be active, and the next page will be highlighted, and so on.

But never mind, Firefox is going there a bit by bit, and the nice thing is, thy listen!