> > As someone who's not up on all the latest hype, can you tell me what's so great about this FireFox? I currently favor Netscape... it's what I use at work, and I started using it at home too, although I still have IE installed. What are some of FireFox's features?
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> Assuming you mean Netscape 7.something (7.2 in particular), not a great deal, to be honest. Firefox is faster and smaller, it has a simpler interface, better support for extensions, and a few other features that are nice but not essential.

Does Netscape 7.2 have tabbed browsing? This was one of the reasons I switched to Firefox back when it was at version 0.7. It's one of those things you don't realize is so convenient and efficient until you switch back to a non-tabbed browser and try to deal with the mess of multiple windows again.

The other thing I want to point out is that when iwpg says "faster," he really meant, "WAY WAY TO THE MOON FASTER." IE and Netscape both take a good ten seconds to open on my system, whereas Firefox is basically instantaneous.

A third reason Firefox quickly persuaded this once die-hard Netscape fan to abandon it forever is the utter lack of clutter. I don't know if Netscape is any better now, but the last version I used (6.2) there were Home, Netscape, Search, and Shop buttons on my bookmarks toolbar, and as far as I could tell there were no way to get rid of them, despite that I never used them and got frustrated every time I accidentally clicked on one. The sidebar -- same deal, although I did figure out how to disable that, provided I don't accidentally hit the key to reenable it. With browser real estate usually in a bind, I don't know why anybody would want that stupid sidebar thing in there. Some people must use it, but it was very, very wrong for me.

With Firefox, I think you can install plugins to do that stuff, but what you get out of the box is just the browser. You don't get a thousand other built-in applications hogging disk space and memory, just the browser, lean and mean, and basically full freedom to do what you want with it.

Despite what this post sounds, I'm not trying to sell you on Firefox. Everybody has different needs for these sorts of things. But this is the perspective of somebody who is usually very set in his ways and yet leapt upon Firefox after seeing it practically for the first time and never regretted it.