Speaking of upgrading my browsers, on top of going to IE7, I’ve upgraded to Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9.0. All these are nice but I still like IE because most websites are designed for the masses who are still using IE. But I’ve been to a few of those not so well designed sites with endless popups and there’s that whole security thing. So I use Maxthon as my primary browser. It’s a browser written with IE rendering engine. It supports tabbed browsing, plugins, extensions, ad block, etc. And of course mouse gestures which I think works better than Opera’s implementation even if Opera invented gestures. There are gesture extensions for IE and Firefox but they don’t work as well as the browser natively supporting it.

Anyway, if you like IE and all those sites that still use ActiveX stuff, give Maxthon a whirl and find out IE isn’t all that bad.

I decided to upgrade to IE7 the other day because I figured it couldn’t be any worse than IE6. The upgrade went smoothly and immediately I noticed a few things.

1. I like the minimal UI. It’s clean and uncluttered.
2. It’s got tabs but it doesn’t do mouse gestures.

3. For some strange reason, Google was the default search engine.

After doing a few searches I began to notice that something just wasn’t right… There are no “cached” and “similar pages” links in the search results. My first thought was “Why would google remove that?”. Why indeed? So I fired up my firefox and did the same search and the links are there. This makes me wonder who’s playing the devil here? Is it Google purposely not giving the links or is it IE7 removing them so we’ll use Microsoft Live Search (which happen to have “cached” links). Or maybe it’s something I’ve completely missed. If anyone knows the answer shoot me a note.