Browser Battle Fatigue

I used to rely on the flimsiest of rationales to exploit the ongoing browser war between Internet Explorer and Firefox -- market share reports, analysts' comments, my dark inner voices.

Now, faced with genuine news -- the long-awaited full, official updates to both browsers -- I can barely stifle a yawn.

Which is weird because I read that both Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation made some significant improvements to their respective browsers. In this week's Executive Tech column, Brian Livingston urges readers to download IE 7 (released last week) because it features a number of security upgrades over IE 6, which Brian dubs "the world's least secure browser."

And today Mozilla made Firefox 2.0 available for download. According to internetnews.com's Sean Michael Kerner:

FF2 includes new features, a new look and more stability and performance than its predecessors in the 1.5.x Firefox branch, which debuted nearly a year ago.

Sounds great! So too does the improvement to Firefox's tabbed browser , one of my favorite tools.

Yet I remain oddly indifferent. Maybe it's because, on my list of Internet-related annoyances, a glitchy browser rates well below, say, spotty wireless connections and endless emails urging me to change that eBay password I don't have.

On the other hand, solutions for those problems don't appear to be readily available for free download. But the improved browsers are.