The latest version of IE (7) defies description –  I’d love to say that it runs like a pig, but that would imply that it runs more often than it does, and in general would be an insult to pigs everywhere.

Its not like the developers at MSFT are stupid, they’ve done some truly brilliant work over the last few years.  And it’s not like I haven’t read all the stupid posts about disabling all of the various phishing philters and the like.  But the bottom line is that on every machine I run IE on, I need to have the task manager handy, in order to kill it when it locks up for the umpteenth time.

I ostensibly make my living focusing on Microsoft stuff, so I used to stand on the sidelines and watch when many others I knew began to use Firefox as their primary browser.  And my reward for this ?   In order to get any work done I now have to use Firefox, and I only use IE to access sites that are problematic with firefox, namely some microsoft.com pages….

What kind of utter cluelessness is running rampant in Redmond these days –  they have done some truly seminal work with the new core technologies (W*F), yet the organization as a whole is a disaster zone.  I’m now finding that when asked for advice on developing a new site, I can respond positively about some msft stuff – but I am forced to add a caveat –  don’t use IE during development, and make sure you select a non-microsoft tool for page design.  The entire advantage to any specialization on Microsoft is being destroyed, by Microsoft themselves.  A friend of mine (an admitted Mac fan, err zealot) argues that in twenty years Microsoft will be completely irrelevant –  I wonder if he may be right.

The real issue though ?  – If you can’t keep it together with your flagship products, isn’t it best to assume that any new initiative you have is probably going to spiral into madness ?  But that’s a separate post on Vista for a later time.  :-)