I was spending hours upon hours researching a topic for school; that dreaded final paper of the semester was due. I had my research spread across 5 instances of Internet Explorer, and was finding some good information. Suddenly, it happened: Without warning IE crashed on me. Of course, when IE crashes, all of your new bookmarks, history, and any progress you may have made are instantly wiped out. Well, after about the fourth time this has happened to me in as many months (yes, I’m a slow learner…) I decided to see what other browsers there were.

I once tried Netscape Navigator, but never really liked it. All the web pages I went to seemed to look different in Netscape than IE, and it had a feel I just couldn’t get use to.

So I was suggested by a friend to try Mozilla Firefox.

From the beginning I was skeptical after my Netscape endeavor. I didn’t feel like I wanted to learn a new browser and all the workings of it. The install went simply enough at least. I was pointed here to get the quick download, and the installation went without a hitch. After firing it up for the first time, I got to play a round a bit.

Options The settings were pretty easy to configure so that it was similar to IE. It took only 5 minutes of reading to understand the options in Firefox and get everything where I wanted it. This was mostly because of Firefox’s intuitive user interface. Everything was already configured how I needed it!

Tabbed Browsing This was a new idea and one that I can’t live without now. I can easily manage all of my windows and organize the websites I am browsing on Firefox. It is a lot easier when working with tabs than searching through multiple windows. Firefox does this beautifully!

Coding All the web sites that I view normally in IE look just as good in Firefox. No more of that annoying code rendering where the same site looks completely different. I was worried about this one, but I know now that it is really a lot better than I thought.

Stability I’ve been using Firefox heavily for 4 months now, and it has yet to crash. Despite my best efforts, I can’t get this browser to go down! Another plus about Firefox is that it will remember your favorites and history even if it does crash (from what I read, no experience with this yet!).

Overall Experience On a scale from 1-10, I give Firefox an ELEVEN! From great stability to a wonderful user experience, this browser has it all! I feel more secure with it as well, because all of the security flaws that are present in Internet Explorer don’t apply to Firefox. Even though only a small percentage of users on the internet use Firefox, I think we’ll see those numbers go up dramatically in the next few years. It is faster, more secure, more stable, and more user friendly. What more could you ask for?!

If you haven’t tried Firefox yet, test it out now. You’ll be hooked, I guarantee it.