Mozilla's FireFox Vs Internet Explorer

Microsoft's Internet Explorer is the free World Wide Web browser included in every version of Microsoft® Windows™. Being included in the majority of personal computers when they're sold, most people are introduced to the internet with Internet Explorer as their first web browser.

Internet Explorer (IE) has at least one major security design flaw. Beyond mere inclusion with Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer is integrated into the operating system. Microsoft claims without IE's core components Windows can not fully function. It's integrated into the file system browser and other applications. Therefore no capability is given to completely uninstall it, even for servers. The low level integration also results in web browser security issues creating operating system vulnerabilities, sometimes even if the browser is never launched directly by the user. Many security bugs in IE could be exploited to give an attacker complete control over Windows. Security patches for Internet Explorer also sometimes cause peripheral problems in the operating system.

A few relatively mainstream web browser alternatives are available for Windows users.

Where as, Mozilla's FireFox suite of open source web browser, e-mail client, and IRC client are consistant across Windows, Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X. They basically look and behave the same wherever they are run. This is accomplished by making a core library for web page rendering and another for drawing its own user interface.

One major goal of the Mozilla Organization is adherence to web standards. Therefore the core web page rendering library is often used by other projects. The Firefox web browser is the Mozilla Organization's own leaner browser, using the excellent rendering engine with a fast native user interface. Firefox became popular very quickly due to its speed, standards compliance, and lack of many significant security issues as seen in Internet Explorer. To give some proportion to Firefox's efficiency, consider its size: 4.6 MB. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer weighs in at 80 MB as part of Windows XP SP2.

"Internet Explorer users can be as much as 31 times more likely to end up with a spyware-infected PC than people who go online with Mozilla's Firefox browser." (Source article removed from Yahoo! News.) In addition to better security, Firefox offers features not found in Internet Explorer, such as tabbed browsing and built-in web searching. Firefox also provides better form completion and easier configuration.