Jelle Druyts

I just installed the new MSN Toolbar 1.2 to check out the tabbed browsing that's been the talk of the town lately. But boy does it suck.

It looks and feels flakey, my screen flickers like crazy when switching "tabs" (which in fact just seems to do some hidden window magic, looking at the jumping taskbar items), it messes with my IE window (hey, suddenly it's not maximized anymore), it makes the IE window actually lose focus sometimes, and it can't be used without enabling the MSN Search Toolbar (which I don't even want, the Google Toolbar still kicks its behind with the clickable search words and everything).

So there you have it: boo! If I want tabbed browsing, I'll use Firefox thankyouverymuch. It's just so much cleaner, and you can tell it's built into the product - not patched on. Let's hope IE7 does a better job at this...

Furthermore, what's up with the installer for this new release? Apparently I need to uninstall the previous one, making me lose my indexes, settings and my list of shortcuts? Geez, thanks for the smooth upgrade.

And what happened to the advanced query syntax that rescued me before? It stopped working for me ever since the toolbar went out of beta.

Come on guys, you were on a roll with this product, but now you're losing my trust. I wish I hadn't upgraded to anything beyond the beta, who says I will next time?