Mozilla Firefox 3

There is one battle that any other browser will always have to fight with Internet Explorer. That is that Internet Explorer is part of the Windows operating system, and therefore comes pre-installed on all Windows machines. The majority of users are hardly even aware that it's possible to get a different browser; they use Internet Explorer because it is there and it works. However, amongst people who choose which browser to use Firefox is the leading contender, and Firefox 3 makes this all the more clear.

There are a number of things that Firefox 3 does a lot better than Internet Explorer (even comparing it with the Internet Explorer eight beta) there are also a lot of features in Firefox that aren't in Internet Explorer. And the top reason is that Firefox 3 has thousands of plug-ins available so if there is something you want Firefox to do that it currently doesn't you can usually find a plug-in to handle it for you. The coding to Internet Explorer is a tightly guarded secret that there are no plug-ins, although to be fair, there are a handful of third-party applications that will work with Internet Explorer.

The Firefox community claimed two major ways that Firefox 3 is much better than Internet Explorer, those are security and speed.

The security on Firefox is far ahead of the security on Internet Explorer. It is much harder with Firefox to actually visit a phishing site or a site that will try to download malware to your computer. Firefox is set by default to block these sites from the user; Internet Explorer has no such setting. In tests where computers were deliberately infected with various malware applications such as adware, Internet Explorer succumbed quickly, whereas Firefox was able to stave off many of these attacks.

Firefox has always had the edge over Internet Explorer on the speed of loading and speed of displaying Web pages. This edge is extended even further with Firefox 3. The only slight cloud on the horizon is that the Flash plug-in for Firefox is slightly less effective than the Flash plug-in for Internet Explorer.

There is a whole host of features that are either simply not available in Internet Explorer or are only partially implemented. For example, a feature available in Firefox is the fav icon information. If you click on the fav icon in Internet Explorer nothing happens, if you click on the fav icon in Firefox 3 you are presented with information about that site, and your use of it.

Add to this, features such as a more robust auto complete, smart book marking, a better download manager and the possibilities for customization. In independent tests, Firefox 3 clearly outperforms Internet Explorer.