Songbird? No bloatware, thanks.
Based on Firefox’s XUL technology and VLC, Songbirdnest throws itself into the world of media players and open source. However, it’s total bloatware right now. Besides having a huge number of web source bookmarks and a somewhat not too hard to look at front end, it’s just a VLC skin. And, because it uses Firefox technology, it uses an intolerable 66 MB of ram compared to Windows Media Player’s 15 MB:
Why am I going to run an uglier, slower, less feature rich media player that takes up four times as much of my system’s precious resources? Ask Paul or AtariBoy who have also reviewed it.
p.s. Importing my 9,100 tracks shouldn’t take all day.
IE 7 Beta 2: Fonts
I’m not happy with the fonts in IE7b2. Let me give you an example, from this very page:
As you can see, IE doesn’t properly antialias its fonts like Firefox does, making them look somewhat chunky. Even though they now let you scale fonts to an arbitrary size, what’s the point if they don’t look good? Here’s a closeup that might help you notice the difference:
I can’t figure out why they are doing such weird antialiasing, but it doesn’t look sharp or professional.
IE 7 Beta 2: Quick Tabs
Internet Explorer Beta 2 Preview introduces a new and very cool feature that they call quick tabs. Yes, this is a feature that Firefox has not come up with, which is an efficient graphical display of the content of your tabs. At any point while using the new IE, just hit control-q and up comes the quick tabs display:
As you can see, IE7b2 organizes the tabs into a matrix with small picture previews of each website. From this page, you can choose to switch to a tab quickly, or close given tabs.