Introduction

In light of the many short comings of Internet Explorer both in terms of features and security, there is a renewed interest in the browser wars which have gone from a titanic clash to random skirmishes. In the last year or so, there has been momentum building from the Mozilla camp from a sleepy little product that is now known as Firefox. Originally called Phoenix, Firefox ran into some name problems and was renamed Firebird. Running into further name problems, Firebird was renamed to Firefox. Identity crises aside, Mozilla has created a cool app that has started garnering a lot of attention lately and for good reason. Firefox is a modern, fast and capable browser; everything that Netscape was not when it started losing ground against IE's onslaught.

For those that are not familiar with Firefox, it is the stripped down browser-only version of the Mozilla Web-Browser suite, the open source project which Netscape is based off of. The major improvements that Firefox brings are tabbed browsing as well as pop up blocking by default. Tabbed browsing allows the user to go with a single window with multiple windows approach. IE style multiple windows mode is still possible giving the end user a choice with style preferences. I tend to use a combination of both tabs and windows. An example would be using a single window for a messageboard and opening threads of interest in their own tab. When I am through with the forum I can just close the window and all the threads I have visited. I tend to use multiple windows still but just not as many as I used to.

One of my favorites things is that flash is not installed by default. This means no annoying flash ads that dance across the screen. It can be installed later on of course but I keep Firefox free of it and use IE to view Flash pages when needed.

Windows SP2 is rumored to bring pop up blocking to IE and an assortment of utilities including toolbars from Google and Yahoo can do this on the IE side. The security changes on IE's side are yet to be seen.