Hicham Maged's blog Inquisitive curiosity paves knowledge path

Firefox ft. Internet Explorer

Assalam Alaikum wa rahmat Allah.
Peace be upon you dear visitor.

Browsers War: Firefox ft. Explorer

Nowadays, it is notable how Mozilla Firefox is strongly hitting the road among common users and Internet geeks. Since its first release on 9^th November 2004, over 100 million copies have been downloaded until today.

This was the spark that ignited the hot and exciting competition between Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) to master the web browser marketplace today in 2005.

Browsers War

Although nowadays Internet users can have various browsers to surf, the most popular ones are these two giants. Internet Explorer is shipped by default in Windows Operating systems where as Firefox is taking over the place after Netscape Communicator (or Navigator) resined lately.

These are my reasons for electing the two browsers as the subject of this post, so let us go through more details on this nice competition between their companies.

Mozilla Firefox Logo

Mozilla Firefox has a nice slogan; “Rediscover the Web” and this is true in terms of the supported features like: tabbed browsing, live bookmarks, pop-up blocking, multi-language support, themes plus extensions, customized integrated search, and operating on cross platforms that works on many operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and UNIX.

Recently, the new Firefox 1.5 version was released couple of days ago on 29^th of November 2005 with brand new features as announced by Mozilla. Since then, about two million copies were downloaded until now, according to Wikipedia. Nevertheless, the capability of having add-ons makes Firefox a suitable environment for web developers to check, customize and have their own applications which simply expands the horizon.

Firefox Tip: in the address bar, enter about:mozilla and see what happens!

Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) Logo

On the other hand, Microsoft is working hard on releasing a new version of Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) which will carry the number 7 in the history of IE releases.

For those who are new in the tech world, IE goes back to the year 1995, and used to work on both 16-bit versions of Windows (3.x). Later it was shipped with Microsoft Windows 95 and later versions as an integrated part of the windows operating systems.

Currently a beta version was released for the developers to apply beta testing according to Microsoft website. They call this new version: “A new, re-designed and more secure version of Internet Explorer is now in beta testing with developers.” Hence, it is clear that Microsoft IE team is working hard in order to introduce the new IE 7 to the users and continue with the battle.

According to Wikipedia, the name of Microsoft Internet Explorer will change to Windows Internet Explorer starting in Windows Vista which means that the competition’s temperature is rising, and the 2005 winter will face heat.

Me and The Browsers War

Since I got my own Desktop PC, MSIE was usually used. However I like to use different browsers for the sake of checking compatibility of websites. For that matter, my favorite browser in the past was the famous Netscape Navigator/Communicator. Nowadays, I switched to use Mozilla Firefox and have not stopped using as it replaced all the other browsers on my list.

Nevertheless, if users are looking for a web-browsers application, then Firefox and MSIE can be their choice. However, if they are looking for a complete suite that contains: browser, composer, mail client, and newsreader, then either Mozilla Suite or Netscape Navigator/Communicator can be their choice. In parallel, Microsoft ships Outlook Express with windows as a mail and newsreader application.

Finally, let us wait and see the new version of MSIE. I think it have new features to cope with the new technology, not only because Microsoft say so, but also because they want to keep on the competition with Firefox. We shall wait and see, so it is a good idea that you to try both of them yourself and pick up what you feel you want to use.

note: if you want to re-use the illustration created by me at the top of this post, please check the ‘terms of use’ page. Thanks!

Salam,
Hicham

« logos credit: (mozilla.com) – (microsoft.com) »

Tags: geek tips
Categories: Tech
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