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Rather than manually installing either the IE7 or Firefox 2 upgrades, I thought I'd wait and see which one initiated the installation first, through an auto-update. Microsoft won this battle (I'm still waiting on Mozilla but not the least bit concerned about it). However, and this is typical for Microsoft, the installation was anything but convenient. Since the browser is so closely tied to the core OS, it took something on the order of 20 minutes and several reboots to finish.

I suspect the Firefox upgrade will be relatively painless, based on past experience. The only thing you have to do typically is restart is the browser itself, which makes perfect sense. If anything, I may have some issues with extensions that are no longer "compatible" and will be disabled after installation. Several of my favorite extensions will no longer be necessary anyway, as Firefox 2 now has the same functionality built-in.

While I'm on the topic of Microsoft, am I the only developer who's jaw dropped in amazement when they heard that Zend is now working with them to improve the stability and performance of PHP running under IIS? As far as I can tell, this boils down to a port of FastCGI as an add-on to the server. I've never used Windows on the server-side, and you couldn't pay me six figures to use IIS. Perhaps Microsoft is following IBM's lead in recognizing and supporting the role of open-source.