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February 09, 2006
Review: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, And Other Browsers In Four-Way Shootout Firefox 1.5
Let's cut to the chase: Firefox lets you "stick it to the Man." And you know who that is, right? It would be a mistake to discount the strong, incalculable appeal of bucking the software establishment, but Firefox doesn't exactly have a corner on the market. You could, for instance, accomplish the same act of rebellion with that all-but-forgotten hairshirt, the Lynx text browser. So what's the other key factor behind the ascendancy of Mozilla's upstart Web browser? It's straightforward, really. Firefox is a refreshingly simple application that's a delight to use.
The reason for Mozilla's success isn't much of a secret. From the start, it gave strong consideration to the overall user experience, and baked that thinking into its product design goals. Since the mid-1990s, when Netscape began to confuse a large, bloated, chock-full-of-enterprise-features "browser suite" with success, no other standalone Web browser but Firefox has offered a level of usability that could compete with Internet Explorer. And while Firefox's star was rising, IE's was sputtering to a halt. As we moved into the new century, Microsoft stopped adding anything to its browser except security and look-and-feel parallelism updates, apparently out of something like baseball's late-inning "defensive indifference." Or, to put it another way, the software giant preferred to focus on other projects. Internet Explorer became dowdy, tedious to use — in short, a killjoy. The current version is so busy saving you from your own security "ignorance" that it's more like a jail sentence than a good time.
For example, Internet Explorer's lack of tabbed-window browsing, first introduced in the Opera browser, spawned an entire field of Internet Explorer "overlay," or add-on, browsers that use the IE browsing engine but overlay custom look-and-feel and features. Virtually all of these IE-based browsers, such as Avant Browser and Maxthon, provide tabbed browsing. Mozilla, meanwhile, accurately gauged that tabbed browsing was the pivotal feature it must deliver in Firefox. Page 8: Firefox 1.5: Instant Gratification
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