The Firefox brand of web browser is one that many Internet users both know and love. But what many don’t know is that the browser first got its roots in an entirely different browser altogether- Netscape Navigator. Because of the hot war between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, Netscape eventually decided to release their source code as an open source item to be viewed and developed by any who wished. This decision led to the founding of the Mozilla Firefox project, previously know as Firebird, in 1998. Ever since the critical acclaim that Firefox obtained after its mainstream success, it seems that the browser has been outperforming each and every release of Internet Explorer that comes out in recent months. After all, the long development time and open source movement can be quite a powerful tool indeed.

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.

Firefox derives its powerful rendering engine “Gecko” from its parent Mozilla products. Its rendering is precise and speedy though it fails Acid 2 test (a standard compliance test for webpage rendering) but still scores well above than IE, which lags at the bottom when rendering is considered.

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.

Firefox has long been given popularity due to the simple fact that it supports tabbed browsing. Some versions of Internet Explorer allow for this feat, but Internet Explorer doesn’t handle memory usage properly, and lagging is a common repercussion. Opera is another example of a browser that uses tabbed browsing, but expands on the idea by offering thumbnail previews.

A browser crash is something that is hated by many. After all, it’s extremely counter-productive to be browsing the Internet and have a browser completely stop responding. Even Firefox admits that browser crashes happen, but they implemented a session restore feature that gives URL data and other information to users, should they want to restore the URLs they were previously viewing. This is something Internet Explorer lacks, and is much less appealing as a result.

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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