I just want to take this morning moment to confirm that Microsoft’s IE 7 sucks. From beginning to end. It’s amazing to me that one of the most successful companies on the planet can just continue to turn out junk.

Like most people, I assume, my journey with IE 7 started with a forced march to upgrade. Okay, okay, when you’re dealing with Redmond, upgrading is now a critical system update. But after successfully installing the upgrade on my brand new computer, and restarting, IE 7 won’t launch. No matter what I do, even in safe mode, launching IE7 brings up a browser for a 10th of second, before it shuts down. Good thing I’ve got Firefox.

With Firefox, I go back to the MS site and download the IE7 package directly. I uninstall and reinstall IE7, and now it works, um, properly. Microsoft borrowed the Firefox concept of tabbed browsing, but where it made sense in Firefox, it’s now whack-a-mole in IE7–I still can’t figure out the logic of what opens a new window and what opens a new tab, but anytime I look at a browser window, it turns out I’ve got 10 or 20 tabs open. But my favorite feature of the new IE? It hangs and crashes constantly. As in, at least every hour I have to shut it down completely and restart it.

I’m sure they’ll get it stabilized by the time Vista comes out. Can’t wait.