Webupon

Cost

Firefox is free for everyone. You might think that Internet Explorer is free, too. It isn’t because it’s part of Windows and when you bought your Windows, you paid for it. But always the product you pay isn’t better than you can get legally for free.

Features

Internet Explorer is nowadays very near the feature list of Firefox and all other browsers. It had a lack of tabs and pop-up blocker before. Firefox is a little better with it’s configuration tool because when you configure Firefox, you configure Firefox and when you configure Internet Explorer you might configure things that modifies also other Windows tools configuration like proxy servers.

Interface

Firefox has a little more original (and maybe old) look and interface. It’s easier to use for beginners and easy for people moving from old Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). The new interface of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) is a little odd for older users and takes a little time to learn using it, I think.

Plug & Play

This might be a trademark of Microsoft but it’s also a term meaning easily installable devices, software, plugins… etc. There’s many plugins for Internet Explorer but they might modify your system a little deeper (or do I just think this way?) than Firefox plugins which can be disabled/enabled/installed/removed/configured using Firefox own plugin manager and any of these tasks often needs just a restart of Firefox not the whole system. Internet Explorer is also more “plug & play” with malware than Firefox is.

Standards and Scripts

Few sites requires or suggests Internet Explorer. Firefox can pretend being Internet Explorer if it’s required. I have been thinking if this is caused by two standards. The standard syntaxes and the IE syntaxes which causes that sometimes “javascripts” have to be made for IE and non-IE browsers. Always the problem isn’t either the development of two standards. Simply, all the sites might not work with Internet Explorer in the future.

Documentation

Internet Explorer has its own documentation included with Windows. Many plugin’s installations has their own step-by-step tutorials and using Google, you will find many hits, more than for Firefox. But using Firefox, you might get better documentation and help from the developers or next to developers, people that do work with Firefox. If you contact Microsoft asking for help, you most commonly get a link to page in their own web documentation or you have to pay or you figure it out for yourself. Never tried but I see it this way.

Compatibility

If you once study your Firefox well, you will be able to use it on different platforms (often default graphic browser in Linux) and use different browsers that are the same kind because free and open software development goes often with the same line with same ideas to provide better compatibility between different applications.

IE users, please think about it.