Which browser to choose, IE7 or Firefox 2?

The browser world has not been this busy before. 5 years after the previous version, Microsoft released IE7, because it feels the threat from Firefox. One week later, Firefox release second edition.

After IE became the dominant browser in the Internet, Netscape closed its product line in Windows system. Microsoft has no intend to develop better browser. Under this circumstance, open source community Mozilla which inherited the source code of Netscape released Firefox in November, 2004.

The biggest difference between Firefox and IE is extensibility: A developer with 1 year experience of HTML and JavaScript can make extension for Firefox. So numerous extensions were made by Firefox fans: TabBrowser, AdBlock, Flashget, Session Saver, Weather Report... The security of extension can be easily verified because the extension is provided as zipped source code, and everyone can check the code. At least the extension can not hurt the operating system. Mozilla provides an add-on website to make those verified extension official. Users can visit this website to find the extensions they like. In another way, developer must have more than 2 years C programming experience to make a success IE plug-in; After the IE plug-in is installed into a computer, it gains admin privilege, and it can become a harmful spyware or Trojan horse. The worse thing is that it is distributed as machine code, and no one except the developer knows exactly what this program does. Since Microsoft cannot check the source code, it doesn't build a website to endorse the extensions. Actually, the IE plug-in has been a problem in the Internet, because a lot of users click "Yes" when they see a pop-up window saying "xxxx program, do you want to install?" Lack of security sense leads to the intrusion of BadWare.

The popularity of extension brings into creativity of programmers. The Firefox updates very often, and the TabBrowser has been built into Firefox 1.0, and the Session Saver and Spell Checker are built into Firefox 2.0. The developer of Firefox adopted the advice from the creative programmers all over the world to build user-friendly browser.

Spelling Checker, (Windows can have it built-in)

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