If you haven't heard of a browser called Mozilla Firefox I'm glad you're reading this. Firefox is the latest and greatest in browser technology. It's a relatively small browser used primarily by geeks, but it's been consistently gaining momentum and winning loyal users across the board.
Anyway, why Firefox? Why bother? It's hard to rehash the Firefox FAQ so I encourage you check it out on your own. It's worth the time. In a nutshell it has IE's functionality plus what is blatantly missing from IE. Tabbed navigation, built-in popup blocker (the best thing is you never get annoyed by ActiveX control download screens!), a slick download manager, and what's the most important—strict adherence to web standards.
The browser wars are not over. I think they've entered a new phase. In my opinion, the Netscape camp took time off to regroup, ditch old code, and build a whole new browser engine. Therefore it's safe to say that the latest browsers that utilize Mozilla's engine (Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape) are superb compared to IE. If you care about writing accessible, future-compatible web applications they are your testing ground!
So what's the story with IE? What is really frustrating is that the folks from the IE team don't talk. Nothing is known about the roadmap for Internet Explorer, what will be fixed and what won't. If it weren't for the fact that IE has some of the most perplexing bugs in the rendering engine it wouldn't have been so big of an issue.
Ignoring bugs that have been there for a long time could turn out to be a dangerous avenue. Using browser hacks to accommodate for those bugs isn't fun at all.
I believe in the technical genius of folks at Microsoft, just like I believe that they can produce a killer browser with outstanding support of web standards (don't kid yourselves, they are standards, not recommendations) and accessibility features found in modern browsers. You can't hide behind Mr Sullivan's lame comment forever (see Developers gripe about IE standards inaction). Microsoft is much better than that when it comes to technology.
I also understand that updating IE is an insanely complex task. IE is so tightly integrated with the operating system that you can't just pluck it out or install a newer version on top of it. It's everywhere. Often times you're looking at the browser ActiveX control without even knowing it. It's much easier to replace a standalone browser, be it Mozilla, Forefox, Opera, by simply reinstalling it. No harm done. As a positive side effect, you can run different versions of say, Opera or Netscape, at the same time! Now that's helpful for testing! But I digress...
As of the time of this writing Firefox is in ver 0.8 which means it'll take it some time to get near-perfect. It's truly impressive though how solid it is being a pre-release! Give it a try.
