6 Reasons I Use FireFox Instead of Internet Explorer

6 May 2008 229 views No Comment

Well, for starters, the 3 reasons on the FireFox homepage have been true for me:

it’s faster
it’s more secure
it’s fully customizable

Given that I spend hours and hours online every day, all three of those reasons are extremely important to me.

Other reasons are:

It’s a smaller download (5.7MB) compared to IE (14.7MB). That’s significant for people who are using older machines with less hard drive space (and probably slower Internet connections, too.)
Tabbed browsing (something IE7 copied from FireFox, ironically.) As someone who tends to have a lot of applications open at one time, it’s lovely to see just one instance of FireFox in my taskbar instead of one for each web page I’ve got open at the moment. I also (no surpise) tend to have a lot of web pages open at once, and with FireFox they’re all neat and tidy, available via tabs within the same window.
The integrated pop-up blocker keeps annoying pop-ups out of my face. I used to have to have a separate pop-up blocker program running in the background, but I’ve since uninstalled it, because FireFox handles pop-ups for me.

There are many other reasons I prefer FireFox to IE, but these are the main ones. And, if I’m honest, I just don’t like the stranglehold that Microsoft has on the PC software market. So if I can find an OpenSource alternative that works for me, I’m all over it.