I am a firm believer that good competition contributes to innovation. Now the internet is virtually universal, possibly billions of people are using a web browser to surf the internet to gather information and provide entertainment as well as education.

The World Wide Web (WWW) as we know it is only about 13 years old, but has gone through a dynamic and rapid evolution to what we have today. There has been an evolution in web browsers, the utility used to view graphical data on the internet. Following the lead of one of the early browsers, Mosaic, and implementing much of its technology, Microsoft became a premier provider of browsers by introducing its Internet Explorer (IE). Internet Explorer has had competition since its inception by such browsers as Netscape, and later strong competitors such as Opera and Firefox. In this highly competitive technological arena, Microsoft recently released the latest iteration of its browser, IE 7. Not to be outdone, a feisty open-source competitor, Mozilla, recently released its answer to Internet Explorer, Firefox version 2, right on the heels of the release of IE 7. By differing media accounts, Firefox has had great success competing against its giant and well funded competitor from Microsoft, taking by some accounts, about 12% of the world market shares for browsers. This is quite an accomplishment considering the integration and inclusion of IE in all recent versions of Windows. Since its inception, there have been security concerns about Internet Explorer, as well as desirable features which many felt have been lacking. This has been a primary reason for the innovation of competition, epitomized by Mozilla and its browser Firefox. This tradition of innovative features and improved security continues with the new release of Firefox 2.

Firefox version 2 is feature rich. Since it is open-source, with it programming code publicly available, there has been much done in an attempt to provide the best WWW experience to the user. Identity theft in the premise of “Phishing”, where spoofed websites attempt to trick users into disclosing personal information, usernames, passwords, credit card and other account numbers, and other sensitive data is endemic. Firefox 2 offers some of the strongest protection available against phishing. By default, phishing protection is turned on in Firefox 2. Firefox 2 checks websites entered against an automatically updated list of known phishing websites, as well as displays the real web address of the site visited, rather than the spoofed address, a give-away that the site is suspicious. Optionally, Firefox 2 can check web addresses against an external database of constantly updated known phishing sites, providing enhanced protection. If the user visits a suspected website that is not on the list, Firefox 2 offers the opportunity to “Report Web Forgery”, or to challenge that a site listed as a phishing site was listed in error, and is indeed legitimate.

Firefox offers tabbed browsing, where new websites can be opened in a tab in the same window as other open websites. If a tab is accidentally closed, the history menu will allow for that tab to be quickly and easily reopened. Sometimes even the best maintained computer can lockup, causing a loss of information. Firefox 2 offers “Session Restore” which will restore the previous session, including opening any tabs, and recovering any text typed into forms in the event of a system lockup or crash. Searching for information is a common internet practice, and Firefox 2 eases the search effort by providing an integrated search box on the toolbar. Popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and others are included in the search selection by default, and countless other search utilities can be easily added. Shopping sites, such as Amazon and EBay can also be added to the search list. By opening a new tab, search terms stay resident in the search box allowing for a simultaneous search of different search engines, each appearing in a new tab if so desired.

Much rapidly evolving information is currently transmitted through a variety of web feeds, such as the popular RSS format. Firefox 2 offers “Live Bookmarks” which automatically tracks updates to websites or news feeds. With this feature, news sites such as CNN or Foxnews can be automatically and continuously monitored, indicating when new content has been added. A similar service is also offered for websites frequently visited by the users, and will indicate if there has been any content change in that website. By clicking on “Latest Headlines” in the bookmark toolbar a display of the latest headlines from the selected news sources will appear. By clicking on the headline, the full news story is displayed.

Many of us frequently fill out online forms and questionnaires. For those of us known to make typo errors or misspell words, Firefox 2 offers us an integral inline spell checker, without having to load an external application.

Many websites utilize Java as a programming language; unless a late version of Java is installed, some websites may not function properly. Firefox 2 resolves this issue by including and incorporating the recent Java 1.7 update.

Firefox 2 is written in much tighter code than IE7, with some pundits considering IE 7 as bloated. This is demonstrated by the different size of the downloads necessary to install each program. IE 7 for Windows XP is about 14 Megs in download size, while Firefox 2 for XP is only about 5 megabytes in size. Because the code is tighter, Firefox takes up less memory and system resources than IE 7 which may arguably promote improved system performance while Firefox 2 is loaded and running, compared to IE 7. There are some media reports that Firefox may also load many web pages slightly faster than IE.

There are many other reasons to consider Firefox 2, including thousands of available and free “add-ons” or “extensions” that can be selected for Firefox to improve the web surfing experience. By personal choice, I use a download manager, a PDF utility (offers the choice of downloading PDF files rather than opening them in a browser window), a download manager, McAfee’s SiteAdvisor (a free utility that indicates the reliability and safety of websites), a FTP utility to assist in uploading to a server, and several other free utilities.

Firefox is available as a free download for most popular operating systems including all versions of Windows from 98 to XP (I have successfully used Firefox on a beta version of Vista), MAC OS X 10.2 or later, and later versions of Linux. Since it is not a major hog of system resources, it can run well on systems with a processor as slow as 233 MHz, and with as little as 64megs of memory.

I use Firefox extensively, and strongly recommend it. On my main computer I have IE 7, Firefox, Opera, and Netscape, all of which can happily coexist. By my own estimate, I probably use Firefox for 95% of my browsing activities. I can recommend it, and suggest that all users download it (it is free), and try it. Go to www.mozilla.com or www.getfirefox.com and give it a try.

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