Renewed browser wars: IE v Firefox

Since the relative demise of Netscape as the last serious competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) three years ago, most of us simply take our Microsoft browser for granted -- warts and all. Virtually every Web site is optimised for IE, and every copy of Microsoft Windows sold includes a version of IE. And with total market saturation come opportunists: criminal hackers who use Microsoft vulnerabilities to take control of your operating system, steal your identity or spread spam.

Another source of Internet vulnerabilities lies within ActiveX technology -- tiny scripts that automatically download when you visit certain Web pages. In most cases, they're good, adding music or animation to a page. But in some cases, criminal hackers have tweaked the code to damage your computer. Microsoft recently added a prompt to IE so that you can accept or deny ActiveX scripts. Firefox doesn't use ActiveX technology, which means that a few Web sites might not appear as their designers intended (although we were hard-pressed to find a site that didn't work because of this during our testing of Firefox).

Mozilla offers a whole suite of secure, independent, open-source Internet tools, but it recently streamlined its browser component and named it Firefox. Since last summer, we've been testing Firefox, and, frankly, we're sold: Firefox is just as fast and just as easy as Internet Explorer -- and more importantly, it's much more secure.

And feature by feature, Firefox either matches or surpasses IE.

IE and Firefox compared
Browser
	IE 6	Firefox 1.0
Key features
Pop-up blocker	yes	yes
Able to selectively block pop-ups or view blocked pop-ups later	yes	yes
Built-in RSS reader	no	yes
Able to view multiple pages within same window using a tabbed structure	no	yes
Third-party plug-ins	many	some
Uses ActiveX technology	yes	no
User interface skins	no	yes
OS required	Windows XP SP2 and later only*	all versions of Windows, Mac OS, several Linux distributions
*Going forward, Microsoft will upgrade only the versions of Internet Explorer running on Windows XP SP2. The last standalone version of Internet Explorer 6 will work on versions of Windows up through Windows XP SP1.