In the second week of Battle of the Browsers in this column, I move to the Open Source browser of popular choice: Firefox.  It has many advantages and very few disadvantages over similar browsers.  This is one of the reasons that Firefox could be considered the most popular browser for people who are looking for an IE alternative.  Firefox can be downloaded for most major OSes from here:  http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Building on the Open Source browser Mozilla, Firefox has some sweet features that top IE, but is more scalable than Opera.  Firefox has many features built in, but is practically unlimited because of the support for plug-ins.  There are literally thousands of plug-ins and possibilities for it.

Although it is slimmer out of the box than Opera, it has the capability to go far beyond what Opera supports, because its expandability is only limited by the imaginations of the programmers working on this project.  If you are a programmer and want to create a feature, this allows you to do that without a problem.  From what I’ve seen, the plug-in language is fairly simple.  Chances are, if you see something that you’d like, there is probably a plug-in to match.

Along with Opera, Firefox also has support for tabbed browsing.  It is not quite as well integrated into the design, but it works.  I prefer tabs to be pretty easily opened and used when clicking on links – instead of opening in a new window, I’d rather it open in a new tab.

Without plug-ins, Firefox has support for Pop-up blocking, e-mail, and has some pretty decent security features.  Compared to IE, Firefox blows it away in this regard.  The pop-up blocker works a little bit better than opera’s, while the e-mail portion isn’t quite as user friendly.  Not only does it block pop-ups, but it will block inline advertisements as well.  Getting sick of the “Shoot the Monkey” ads?  Right click, block server!  Very handy on ad-crazy sites.

As far as memory management is concerned, Firefox is just as good as IE, if not better, and a whole lot better than Opera.  It runs at a reasonable level, and hardly ever needs to be restarted like Opera does (to clean the cache out).  Firefox would be a whole lot more attractive to me if it had page caching, which is one of the huge pluses of Opera.

The user interface on Firefox is very clean, and easy to use.  Unlike Opera, it does not have any advertisements on the UI.  Another notable feature in the UI is its customization.  It allows you to set up your workspace practically any way you would like it, and it allows you to maximize your productivity.

Some of the cool plug-ins for Firefox include an IRC feature, Slashdot toolbar, games, etc, that can be found here:  http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

Firefox, in my opinion, ranks just below Opera in features included, but if you include the plug-ins, Firefox will definitely be something to reckon with in the future.  I like its ease of use, and its light grip on memory resources, but I wish it had caching.