IE 7 - slow to open up tabs, slow to start

I do have an appreciation for IE 7. It is a nice web browser. However; sometimes it really makes me wonder.

When I start up IE 7, it is almost always slower to get its UI up on the screen. Then it ponders for a minute to open up the initial web page. This got so annoying to me that I set my home page to blank.

Then, when you open up tabs it has an annoying habit of telling me how great tabbed browsing is and that I just opened a new tab. How wonderful - for a complete novice. And did you notice? It took a long time for IE 7 to connect to the text file on your own PC to bring up this little informative note on tabbed browsing.

So, I quickly set that to blank as well. Oddly enough, my machines are not slouches and it still takes a bit of time to get the blank page up with IE 7. Once you get going everything seems to run smoothly. The browser seems to work well in most cases.

Firefox in task manager takes up 21,068 k of memory, opened to a blank page in a single tab.
IE 7 takes up 37,588K opened up and with a single blank page on a single tab.

And this is part of the major difference between the browsers. If it takes up less memory during operation then it takes less time to load that application in to memory. Microsoft has a horde of programmers and most of them are very good. They need to apply themselves to various issues inside of Internet Explorer. Reducing the memory footprint of the application, increasing start-up speed, increasing new tab creation speed.

All these things add up to a browser that is good, without being great. That is disappointing given Microsoft's advantage in size and availability of manpower. Honestly, they should be able to squash Firefox into nonexistence by releasing a better performing, more capable browser.

It is nice that they compete with so many software providers on so many fronts; however, the bast majority of people who purchase new PCs will be sitting there going on the web and using their web browser. To get name brand recognition and be out in front of people with a good face all the time, IE 7 needs to not only be better than Firefox, it needs to triumph over Firefox.

This is the same position many domestic auto manufacturers find themselves. After years of mediocre performance - they need to produce cars that are far in excess of the Japanese high sellers to gain market reputation that leads to them triumphing over the Japanese and not just a competitor.