Benefits Of The Firefox Browser

Although some would believe otherwise, Firefox was a project that stems back to the middle of the 1990's. Firefox was a direct result of the battle between Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Because Netscape was beginning to lose control of the market share as time wore on, they released their source code to the general public. Once this source code was released the Mozilla Project was founded in 1998, in which developers from all around the world participated in making a browser superior to Internet Explorer. The project, previously known as Firebird, took the Internet community by storm as it was finally hitting mainstream success just years after its inception. As it would seem Firefox is outperforming Microsoft's Internet Explorer in key areas in browser design.

Mozilla Firefox, presently the safest browser available, is backed up by huge community of active volunteer coders who have been with them since the time of Netscape halcyon days. The absence of Active X components, which are widely used to install spy wares as in the case of IE users, makes Firefox a safe browsing experience. Also, what clearly demarcates the IE and Firefox is the frequency of updates that the later receives. If vulnerability is found it is corrected and updated within few days or even within few hours whereas IE receives no updates for years!

Firefox browser is very light weight in terms of its installation setup which is just above 4.9MB as compared to IE which is around 80 MB. Firefox download is available for different platforms like Windows, Mac & Linux and hence is more versatile in usage.

The Acid 2 test is a highly praised test that measures how well an Internet browser can display a webpage. Oddly enough, both Firefox and Internet Explorer fail this test respectively. But it should be noted that Firefox obtains a much higher score than Internet Explorer, who has an embarrassing low grade in browser rendering.

Internet Explorer is commonly close to many types of invention and creativity that Mozilla Firefox lets its users enjoy. Internet explorers can't enjoy open source plugins, themes, or other add-ons that Mozilla Firefox can. In many respects, such add-ons are what can make one browser more useful than another- as we all have specific needs in a browser that only open source developers can address on such a large basis.

Another distinguishing feature of Firefox is the tabbed browsing. With Firefox 2 you can open any number of tabs, rearrange the order of tabs and save all the tabs as bookmarks for latter viewing. Firefox tabbed windows are much superior to IE 7 in terms of memory usage. However one feature which is still missing is the thumbnail preview of each tab as available in Opera browser.

One of the best known features of Firefox 2 is the fact that it offers the session restore ability. Far too often, browsers can crash for reasons beyond the developers. When and if this happens, users will lose everything they were doing. But with session restore, a user can restart a session that saved all URL data being browsed, as well as other helpful information that can make a browser crash much less irritating and counter productive to one's goals.

The browser war will continue to be waged against contenders such as Internet Explorer and Firefox. But as both browsers strive to compete and achieve things such as passing the Acid 2 test, consumers will have to wait and see who will come out on top in the end.

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