For a short while, Firefox was known as Phoenix, and I always felt that it was appropriate for a program, that, like the legendary bird, rose from the ashes-of Netscape Communicator in this case. Now Netscape, in its later versions, had become so bloated and slow that no one in their right minds would have used it, even when it was given away for free.

When the company that owned the software opened up their source code to the open source community, the first thing that the latter did, was to create an entirely new browser engine, called gecko, which went on to form the base of the Mozilla and Firefox browsers. This was a lean, mean engine, resulting in a browser that loaded pages faster than IE (very important in the Indian context).

Firefox came with a number of features that Microsoft never even bothered to give IE. As a result, the heat is now on MS, as evidenced by their decision to release IE 7 even before releasing Longhorn, even though IE 7 was originally supposed to be released along with the new version of the Windows operating system.

What is so good about Firefox?
1. It is a small download-less than 5MB.
2. You can open multiple tabs in a single window, and thus avoid cluttering up your task bar.
3. It has fewer security holes than IE (in fact, only one was reported so far, and that was fixed within days as opposed to the months MS takes with IE).
4. It loads pages faster (if you dont believe me, try it on a dial up connection)
5. It is skinnable and loads of themes are available for free download
6. It comes with a number of extensions, such as mouse gestures, Ad blocking, an RSS aggregator and so on.
7. It has an integrated pop-up blocker (IE 6 has it if you install Win XP Service Pack 2).
8. And lots of other features which you will notice when you use it.

What is bad about Firefox
1. Some sites dont display well in this browser, as they are completely optimised for IE.
2. Newer versions keep coming out thick and fast, so you may have to keep downloading once a month to keep up with the latest version.
3. You have to install Java (JRE) to experience the full power of this software (it works pretty well without it too).

Software version:

Firefox 1.04