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Quietly Moving Ahead …

It is like the annual Ground Hog day ritual. We are waiting another year for the update to Internet Explorer promised by Bill Gates nearly a year ago. And now the date looks like the second half of 2006. I think that means late November if the hold up over the Christmas Holidays on a critical Windows/IE security patch is any indication.

First and foremost by all accounts (see below) Firefox 1.5 is vastly more secure and superior to IE6.

But I ask why wait for Spring? Upgrade to Firefox 1.5 now and be confident that what Firefox delivers now will match and beat handily anything that IE7 has to offer 9-12 months from now:
Firefox has a tabbed interface with new drag and drop simplicity that IE7 may have in 10 months;
Firefox has bookmarking including tab features that IE7 may not have even in 10 months;
Firefox has RSS support and features that IE7 may have in 10 months;
Firefox has important SVG, MathML features that IE7 will not have in 10 months;
Firefox has user set default integrated search engine command line while IE7 resets to MSN at each start up;
Firefox has JavaScript E4X while IE7 may not make 1999 era promises for CSS, DOM, HTML support;
Firefox has popup blockers that IE7 may or may not support 10 months from now;
Firefox has flexible privacy and browsing history controls that IE7 may have in 10 months;
Firefox has more accessibility and keyboard controls that IE7 simply will not have;
Firefox has a user download control center that IE7 simply will not have;
Firefox has a size and download time advantage that IE7 simply will not have;
Firefox has a runtime performance advantage that IE6 cannot and IE7 will be hard pressed to match in 10 months;
Most importantly Firefox has now virus, phishing, and popup controls that IE7 will be hard pressed to match in 10 months;
And see what others have to say about Firefox.

Washington Post – Firefox Leaves No Reason to Endure Internet Explorer
About.com – a thorough and frank review of Firefox 1.06
bent.user – a direct comparison of the two betas Firefox 1.5 and IE7 fro a bent view
CNET.com – an opening review of Firefox 1.0 set an interesting tone
CNET.com – Editors Choice Award second year in a row Nov 2005
eWeek – another frank review of the extensions and other changes in Firefox 1.5
IBM.com – recommends to all 300,00 users to switch to Firefox with internal help desk support
IBM.com – IBM reviews the new advantages of Firefox in XML support for developers
.Net – the Brits take a swipe at Firefox and find themselves wanton – more
Scott Finnie – a candid look at some of the UI problems of IE7 and Firefox
PCmagazine – bestows it Technical Excellence Award of 2006 to Firefox for software development
PCMagazine – rates Firefox browser the product of the Year 2005
PCWorld – also makes the Firefox browser as the product of the year for 2005

Finally, consider these two points. First, Mozilla has planned for release in the summer a major upgrade to Firefox which will add even more new features and performance – see the Firefox 2.0 roadmap here. Second, consider the next time you spend 5-10 minutes or more klutzing around trying to get IE to work properly or recoding to make things work in the IE browser, thats all the time it would take to download and install a better browser, Firefox.

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