Microsoft Internet Explorer
Microsoft's Internet Explorer still dominates the browser market with 70%+ share. It remains the standard choice on most corporate networks. Until the release of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) last year there had been little or no development on the browser for sometime.
With IE7 Microsoft added some major feature improvements which had already become common in FireFox. The features include tabbed browsing, a streamlined interface a search box and RSS integration. It also added a bunch of useful security features like a phishing filter and the ability to delete browsing history from a single window.
If you had been using FireFox before the IE7 release then the new features appear just as a catch up to what was already available for the most part in FireFox. Having said that IE7 is good upgrade to IE6 which had been on the market for 5 years.
Mozilla FireFox
Overall the last couple of years the FireFox web browser has been the first major challenger to Internet Explorer. It has gone from nowhere to being 15% of the market. FireFox has grown in popularity due to a number of key reasons. Firstly, FireFox offer compelling innovations to the web browser. With FireFox you get tabbed browser, an excellent easy-to-use interface and fast browsing. The other advantage was that FireFox was considered secure in comparison to Internet Explorer.
Website owners have now truly embraced FireFox as true alternative web browser. In the past it was fairly common to come across websites which did not view properly in FireFox. Thankfully this has now become a thing of the past and for the most part you no longer need Internet Explorer at all. The flip side of this is that now FireFox is becoming more of a target for malware writers so it will be interesting to see how Mozilla responds. So far they have been doing a good job.
Both IE7 and FireFox are good web browsers. IE7 is vastly improved product but FireFox 2 remains my free internet browser choice due to its speed, ease of use and solid security.