1. Alternatives? Google "list of web browsers" and you'll find literally dozens. Some well regarded ones include Opera, Amaya, Off by One (low on features, but very small and very fast), and Safari (Macs only). Amaya is the W3C's official test-bed browser, so HTML compliance practically means "works in Amaya". Opera is pretty darn good and recently voted number one in a consumer poll. But IMHO the reigning champion is Firefox. I have seen Microsoft zealots who claimed they couldn't leave MSIE because no others are as good, then played with Firefox for five minutes and admitted they had been living in ignorance.

2. The difference between Firefox and the browser component of Mozilla? Basically, Firefox is the next version of the Mozilla browser component. But practically, Firefox comes stripped down as the leanest, meanest full-HTML-compliance browser you can get (< 5 MB download). As the developers put it, "it does one thing, and does it very, very well". But what if you WANT bells and whistles? Well, Firefox has an extremely flexible module loading system, along with scores of easy-to-install plugins to customise it just how you like it. (One plugin I highly recommend is the "User Agent Switcher". Then when you get to a rude and foolish site that claims it "only works with MSIE 6", you just pretend to be MSIE 6....) You might think from that, that configuration would be complicated and users would spend all their time futzing with the settings. You'd be wrong; the control panel is simple and intuitive.

3. What are some of the ways Firefox excels?

Instead of boring you, I'll just point to the list at:

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/why/

I've been using it about two months now, and my experience so far is that all those points are true - except for "themes", which I just don't care about. In fact, I think most are understated. I'd also add that there's an important site on our corporate intranet which runs an extremely complicated and slow Javascript, and I've found Firefox to run it *more than double* the speed of MSIE, which has been a big boon to productivity around here. In fact the main business advantages are:

* productivity. It's faster than MSIE at just about everything, from installing it, through displaying pages and searching, to executing scripts

* security. Say no more.

IMHO these two reasons are sufficient to fire any idiot who still recommends MSIE for a business setting.

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/8998/27239#27239