To put things in perspective, I am running Vista (yet to make the move to Windows 7) on a reasonably highly configured desktop with a fast dual core processor, 4GB RAM and 256MB graphics card. As far as Windows goes, this OS on this machine has been reasonably trouble free for me over the past couple of years.

The migration from Firefox was a reluctant one. I loved the Firefox 2 series with its speed and tabbed browsing. When IE 7 came out, I looked at it briefly but I felt that Firefox was still superior and I felt familiar with it.

Then when the Firefox 3 series was released I was even more impressed. The same familiar interface but even faster, with added features, including improved security.

However, I suspect it was around the Firefox 3.5.x releases - although it may have been earlier - that I noticed things started to go awry. I can't put my finger on an exact incident or time but what I have ended up with after many months of frustration is an unstable browser that often locks up on sites that have auto page refresh and has become increasingly sluggish.

The killer was when I found Firefox 3.5.3 to be almost unusable with my two Internet banking sites. The time lag I experienced bringing up my banking transaction screens was so unbearable that I thought there might be problems with the banking networks.

I tried doing banking using IE 8 and everything seemed to work at normal speeds so I briefly considered moving to IE 8. However, I found that IE 8 had its own problems. Sometimes pages loaded fast; sometimes they loaded slowly; sometimes they didn't load at all. It could have been my configuration but frankly if the integrated Windows browser doesn't work like a charm from the word go, I couldn't be bothered with it.

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