Mozilla Firefox is the web's “second” browser – it currently has about 15% of the market, to Internet Explorer's 80%.

History

Version 1 released in 2004 - currently up to version 2. Version 3 should appear later in 2008.

Features

• Free (like IE)
• Available on multiple platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux)
• Tabbed browsing (had it before IE).
• Spell checker
• Incremental Find or “Find as you type” - looks for matching words on a page as you type in your search term.
• Live Bookmarks – subscribe to feeds and have the feed entries available as bookmarks (i.e. Favourites) on your Bookmarks Toolbar.
• Themes – change Firefox's appearance.

Add-ons

Over 2,000 add-ons or extensions to improve the browsing experience. Created by third party developers. To add, in Firefox, go to https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox.

• Firefox Companion for e-bay – lets you search e-bay, and also keep on eye on your e-bay trading wherever you are on the web – displays as a side bar in your browser window.
• Google Toolbar – search box, get news reports, Autofill, add your own buttons from the range provided – (also available for IE)
• Googlepedia - displays relevant articles from Wikipedia on Google search engine results pages
  Image Zoom – not sure what use this is, but it's fun.
• Pearl Crescent Page saver basic – take snapshots of whole web pages to send to others, etc.
• Web developer tools – very handy tools for those of us trying to get web pages to work properly, in as many different browsers as we can:
• Firebug – helps us to figure out when a page is downloading or running slowly, and why (e.g. too many images, scripts and so forth).
• Web Developer – a menu and toolbar. Lets us turn things off to see how pages work without them.
• MeasureIt! - to let you measure the size of graphics, blocks of text, etc.
• ColorZilla – an eyedropper for finding out colors
• Adblock Plus – lets you stop page elements, such as advertisements, from being downloaded and displayed. Customisable by you.
• PicLens – great new image slideshow viewer – use it to display photo streams from Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, Facebook, etc.

Advantages (supposed) over IE:

• Better security – fewer security vulnerabilities, and the Mozilla team usually provides patches for them much more quickly than Microsoft.
• Greater support for web standards, although IE becomes more standards-compliant with each new version.
• Less code bloat – Mozilla try to keep the overall size of the core Firefox product down to improve download speeds, etc. - you then add the extensions you want to enhance your own browsing experience.