A recent press release from the makers of Firefox announced that over 20 million people have chosen to use Firefox 1.5. CNET awarded Firefox1.5 the “Editor’s Choice Award.”

“Unlike Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.5 offers built-in search, tabbed browsing, and an RSS reader. The new features we see in Firefox 1.5 easily best the bells and whistles we’ve seen within the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP. “

This adds another award to the already garnered “Technical Excellence Award” and the “Best of 2005 Award,” from PC Magazine.

Firefox 1.5 was introduced to the web community on November 29th, 2005 and already has a large following. Some estimate that the number of Firefox users has grown to about 25% or more over Internet Explorer. While this estimate might be high for the general public, it seems that the numbers might hold true and could be even higher in the web development and advance web user community.

What makes Firefox so attractive to web users is that it has a lot less security issues, especially when compared to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Microsoft is accused of being slow to fix security holes in their software and so Explorer is vulnerable to spyware and viruses. Not too many casual web users take the time to add patches to their current installs and so they are vulnerable to these security holes. The Mozilla Foundation in contrast is an open source, non-profit corporation that is supported by developers from all over the world. The way the project is managed allows bugs to be fixed and new features to be added very quickly, sometimes within hours of discovery.

Web site development is continually pushing the browser makers to keep up with the standards set by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium.) New developments in web design include the use of programming such as CSS2, (Cascading Style Sheets) which sounds very technical, but basically are standards that help designers build better sites that are more pleasing to the eye, easy to use and search engine friendly. Firefox 1.5 supports these standards, recommended for use as far back as 1998; many versions of Explorer only support CSS1, older standards. So there will be times where you will see a ‘broken’ site in Internet Explorer while waiting for Microsoft to launch Explorer 7.With recent advances in blogging, for instance, it is feasible to believe that you will start to see more broken sites; many blogging programs use CSS2 in their designs. For more information on what is supported, view Web Browser CSS Support.

Now, don’t rush out and remove Internet Explorer completely from your computer just yet. There are many sites that are written for Internet Explorer and will not work correctly in Firefox. I came across a site with that very issue recently and had to fire up my Explorer Browser to be able to access the password and id protected editing screens.

Currently, I am a two browser person. Most of the time, I use Firefox for its available features that allow me to personalize my browser, but I still use Explorer about 25% of the time for those sites that have not fixed code to be compliant with the W3C standards.

If you want to try Firefox 1.5, you can use the download icon on this site. It is a pretty easy process. Change is hard and getting used to a new program is always a little difficult, but Firefox is very easy to use, more secure and once you discover ‘Tabbed Browsing’, you will be hooked.

 

Liz Hamilton – Maia Internet Consulting

 

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