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Gadget Adviser: Browser Wars _ Firefox Gains on Internet Explorer

Posted on: Wednesday, 28 December 2005, 15:00 CST

A good Web browser can interpret all kinds of coding and deliver to your computer screen a page that looks pretty much the way its creator envisioned. Choose the wrong browser, and you'll find yourself stuck or unwittingly vulnerable to strangers with bad intentions.

Our choice: Mozilla's just-updated Firefox 1.5, which looks and feels a lot like the original Firefox that made its debut in November 2004. It suppresses pop-up ads, thwarts spyware and loads pages faster than Internet Explorer, the browser used by about 85 percent of Web surfers.

This latest version of Firefox still has its ridiculously cool tab system: Just as previously, when you load ChicagoTribune.com on one screen, Merriam-Webster.com on a second screen and Google.com on a third, you see the Google page and tabs to represent the Tribune page and the Webster page _ a seamless way to have several pages open at once so you can bounce between them, speeding up your Web surfing.

What's better now is that you can reorder the tabs by dragging the Google tab in our example and dropping it in front of the Tribune tab.

But that's not all. Now, whenever Firefox is stumped by a Web page's coding, the browser automatically downloads the software extension it needs to get the job done. It's all handled in the background, so you don't have to do a thing. Nice.

Cool add-ons turn Firefox from a browser into a one-stop service. Looking for a job or paying bills? Add a button for the LinkedIn career networking site or the PayPal money transfer site. Don't know the meaning of a word? Add the Answers.com extension to get definitions at the press of a button.

Trying to keep its edge, Internet Explorer is about to get a makeover too. The current version, Internet Explorer 6 with Service Pack 2, is a must if you prefer IE. The service pack, a collection of software fixes, closes holes that hackers could slip through to control your computer. And IE 7 should show up in the next few months, as Microsoft is about to show a preview version to developers.

While Firefox concentrates on ease of use, IE is aimed at security. One of IE's best features is the gold padlock it displays at the bottom of the browser when you're on a secure page (or one that Internet Explorer thinks is secure). For visibility's sake, IE 7 is expected to move that lock from the bottom of the browser and put it near the place where you type in Web addresses.

IE will have to keep improving to secure its dominance in the growing market, which includes Apple's Safari, a slick little number that organizes as well as Firefox but only works on Macs.

But its main competition comes from Firefox, which, from its inception, has been converting smart Web surfers from Internet Explorer and other browsers. At last check, Firefox approached 15 percent of the market, even though it's only a year old. Now that's an impressive browser.

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Want to try these browsers out yourself? Download a free version of Firefox at www.getfirefox.com and

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(c) 2005, Chicago Tribune.

Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at http://www.chicagotribune.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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Source: Chicago Tribune

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