Internet Explorer 8 driving me to Firefox and Chrome

I have remained a staunch supporter and user of Internet Explorer right along until now, even though I use Firefox on Ubuntu, and use Chrome for checking multiple Gmail accounts without changing logins, mostly because it was king of the hill, and it therefore followed that it had the widest support at websites.

So I have withstood the many security problems with IE, the lack of support and lack of direction between 6 and 7, and the ribbing of friends and advice of pundits, for literally years and years. However I am now thinking of changing my browser. What is driving me over the edge?

Strangely enough it is Windows 7. IE8 on Windows 7 sucks. Yes IE is a beta and Win7 is too. However they rev'd the IE8 beta for everything but Win7. And the general improvement in perceived speed and power in Win7 makes the problems I am having with IE8 really annoying.

Some concrete examples would probably give this diatribe more weight. Besides a tendency to crash or lock up, my chief pain point is the time to open the first window. I click on the link in the start menu and literally see no evidence my click "made it" for a minute. Chrome comes on like flicking a light switch in comparison. Firefox is only slightly behind Chrome.

It boils down to one thing. Computers have to get out of our way now and let us do work. We have tolerated the non-toaster-like behavior long enough. Enough computing power is available at this point to make the device disappear into the background as it should.

Update to Evernote problem

Update: I did some perusing of the Evernote forum (for example http://forum.evernote.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=8694&p=33366&hilit=plain+text&sid=cbb2da7fe3c575e3cfa863943d1013b9 ) and it turns out the problem I described in my last post ( http://iponderus.com/2009/02/windows-7-and-evernote-problem.html ) is in Evernote, not Windows 7.

Specifically plain text (as pasted from Notepad) now is pasted by default as "Plain space formatted text" rather than "Plain Text" as a response to complaints from people working with source code and the like.

The work-around for now, is to use Ctrl-Shift-V (rather than Ctrl-V) to paste, which is the keyboard shortcut for "Paste Special" so that you can choose "Plain Text".

Hopefully Evernote will fix this soon.

Windows 7 and Evernote problem

Anybody else notice this? When I paste text from the clipboard in Windows 7 into Evernote, it somehow converts it to "Rich Text", even if that text came from Notepad or a .txt file.

This creates a real problem editing that note on the iPhone version of Evernote, as the iPhone can only append to such notes.

I don't know yet if this is a problem with Windows 7 or Evernote...