Well this post just had to be done.

For those of you running Windows, you would (obviously) know what Internet Explorer is (I’m just going to shorten it down to IE). Hell, even people who don’t run Windows know what IE is, because it’s used so widespread.

Mozilla Firefox is another browser that is becoming popular among Windows, Mac and Linux users.

Comparing the two, advantages and disadvantages

Although the new version of IE has “Tabbed browsing”, I feel I must stress that Firefox had it first, and generally has better extensions and security. And although Firefox is becoming more and more recognised, Internet Explorer’s numbers mean that users (especially those who aren’t very technically gifted) are more familiar and “comfortable” using IE.

It should also be mentioned that IE uses the layout engine Trident, while Firefox uses Gecko, which means that processed code on a webpage will make a webpage appear slightly different for both of them. This is why some pages are specifically coded for Firefox users, or for IE use only. It’s always a good idea to test it in as many different browsers that you can though.

IE And Firefox are both free, although IE comes with a Windows OS, which isn’t free, so you could argue you’re still paying for it. Firefox is an open source browser, meaning that the code is licensed (it’s actually tri-licensed), but that you can use and edit the code however you want. On the Mozilla Firefox website, it encourages users to edit the code and make improvements, even to “hack” Firefox, and share their finding, so that more users can benefit. I personally believe this is a much better way of improving and expanding the code than automatically sent off “reports”, but that’s just me.

This also links nicely with the extensions. Firefox, I have seen, has more practical and fun extensions than Internet Explorer, and is nicely categorised. Personally speaking, when browsing for IE extensions and Firefox ones, Microsoft seemed to make their website a lot less user friendly and organised than Firefox did.

I have added and tried numerous extensions for Firefox, including FoxyProxy, a developed proxy service working with Tor, and other security additions to personalise Firefox to how I like it, a particularly useful quality. There are more available themes for Firefox than Explorer, each with ratings and comments, if you’re interested on how pretty you can make it look. There’s even themes for Mac/ *Linux users, and as Microsoft has “discontinued” making IE for Macs, it’s limited itself to its own Operating System.

I could rant on all day about how Mozilla Firefox is better than Internet Explorer, but it’s always up to the user.

I would suggest downloading Firefox and trying it out for a week if you haven’t already. Get familiar with it and give it a try, download themes and extensions, go on, live a little :p

Steph