Why Mozilla Firefox?

It has been quite sometime Mozilla Firefox has gain market share from internet explorer since 2004. So you may ask “Why Mozilla Firefox?” or “Why not Internet Explorer?” It is time to understand why and you can make your own choice whether you want to switch or not. I’m going to share my own personal experience from user perspective why I like Mozilla Firefox.

1. Firefox is More Secure Than IE

When Firefox was first announced in 2004, it was more secure than IE for various reasons. This is also one of key main reasons why majority of users switch to Firefox for more secure surfing. However, when the recent IE 7 release, I no longer sure this still holds true because a lot of improvements has been made by IE all these years. No software is free of bugs and of course both Firefox and IE cannot run away from it.

HOWEVER, I will still say Firefox is more secure than IE. This is also what most people say but they do not understand the reasons behind. The reason behind is hackers do not want to hack Firefox, they want to hack IE! One of the reasons is 85% of people use IE and as a hacker, you want to target to the bigger crowd. Another reason is most hackers have a strong anti-Microsoft sentiment. They hate Microsoft and they will do their best to hack IE and screw Micrsoft. On the other hand Firefox is an open source and as you know open source is loved by hackers. So, what are you still waiting for? Switch to Firefox now!

2. Firefox has Tabbed Browsing and Better UI

I would say this is the best feature that I like most. I wonder why there is no such feature in IE until IE 7. With this tabbed browsing feature, I no longer require to open too many browser windows in my desktop. It is really messy sometimes. In IE 7, this feature has already been supported. However one thing sucks about IE 7 is they change the UI! If you just switch to IE 7, I bet you have hard time to familiar yourself with the new UI. The whole file menu is gone. I wonder if I should hold back my respect to Microsoft UI which I believe Microsoft's UI the most user-friendly.

3. I love the Firefox’s Find Features

This is also one of the most frequent features I used during surfing. I use the “Ctrl-F” to find a specify string in a page especially there are a lot of information on the pages. IE has this “Ctrl-F” feature but it is really annoying. In IE, it pops up the dialogue when you press “Ctrl-F” and you enter search string. You hit “Enter” to perform the search on the page. However, when you want to search for the next string in the page you need to press “Ctrl-F” again and annoying pop-up dialogue box appears again. You need to continue doing this until you've found what you want.

In Firefox, when you press “Ctrl-F” instead of pop-up dialogue box, it is placed at the lower left just above the browser’s status bar. You can just enter your search string there directly and the Firefox will search the page while you’re typing. The searching is incremental and the found strings are also be highlighted in the page. You hit “Enter”, you will go to the next found string. It is really a very useful and efficient feature as compared to IE.

4. Firefox is Platform Independent

This probably won’t apply to you if you’re just using Windows platform. I like Firefox because it is platform independent. It can runs on Linux, Windows and Mac. It gives me the same user experience when I switch to my Linux box from Windows.

One last thing in terms of speed and memory consumption, I don’t feel much different between Firefox and IE although some say Firefox runs faster with lower memory consumption. For me, there are almost the same. In summary, yes, I do prefer to use Firefox and IE. Please keep in mind that not all the pages can be run one Firefox. Those pages are usually run using Active-X control which is the Microsoft technology. You need an IE browser to run this page. I just don’t understand why the web designer wants to design such a page in the first place? They must be Microsoft supporters.

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