I haven’t used the stock Internet Explorer in several years, and many people agree that it lacks some essential features found in other browsers like Maxthon and FireFox.  For instance, both of these browsers have tabbed browsing and other convenience features like pop-up blocking and some ad-blocking available. 

Maxthon is a browser shell that uses IE as the rendering engine.  Firefox is a shell also that uses the Mozilla engine.  Browser extensions exist for both, but certainly more exist for Firefox.

I have used Maxthon since it was renamed from MyIE2, and MyIE2 befor that.  Maxthon served me well while Firefox was making it to version 1.0.  I’ve now fully converted to Firefox as my main browser.  I wasn’t satisfied by the stock Firefox, but I’m completely satisfied now that I’ve installed extensions like the developer toolbar, IE Tab (that embeds the IE engine in a Firefox tab), and others.

Since I develop web applications, I need to evaluate the experience in Internet Explorer still, so I still have to deal with that. 

There is an extension for Internet Explorer that I really like initially.  It’s Foxie.  It adds a tab bar to IE as well as search box and other features like a adware/spyware firewall.  It’s early in it’s development, but I’m impressed.