Firefox 3.5 is out – 5 reasons why it’s a great browser

5.  Open Source – Firefox is developed by the Open Source community.  It’s free to download.  You can see the source-code.  You can even contribute by helping to write some of the software if you want to.  You can submit ideas to the development community to improve or expand the functionality, and see the results relatively quickly.

4.  Innovation – Firefox was the first to introduce tabbed browsing, integrated search engines, and popup blockers.  Most of these features were added to IE, but Firefox had been doing it for a long time.

3.  Extensions – The architecture of Firefox allows developers to create add-ons to Firefox to add new functionality and features to the browser.  For example, there are plug-ins that will block advertisements on web pages, open IE within a Firefox tab, or make instant updates to your social networking sites.

2.  Speed – It’s difficult to compare browser speed side-by-side.  But moving around in Firefox seems to be much faster.  Opening a new tab with CTRL-T instantly allows you to type in a new web page.  Doing the same in IE shows a noticeable delay of several seconds.  Little things like this make Firefox appear much faster than IE.

1.  Security – Some might say it’s not fair to claim that Firefox is more secure than Internet Explorer.  After all, it has just as many security bugs and patches as IE.  But the difference with Firefox is that the source code is freely available, so the global development community can fix those bugs extremely fast.  Also, Firefox automatically checks for and installs updates for itself automatically.  And because Firefox is standards-based, it does not run ActiveX controls which are proprietary to Microsoft and have a history of security problems.

Tom Weast | Infrastructure Services Consultant