AfterTek

Two combatants Firefox and Internet Explorer are at war.  It’s hardly a secret that this pair of browsers are in nose-to-nose competition, and neither intends to give an inch. And while there are a few other contenders out there, these are the two that everyone is watching.

For a while, Firefox looked like it could actually make a major dent in what almost amounted to a Microsoft monopoly its innovative (although not original) tabbed browsing, straightforward interface, and its vast library of extensions (offering users the opportunity to configure their browsers exactly the way they liked it) made Firefox the Web equivalent of a folk hero. Perhaps because of this achievement, the much heralded version 2.0 offers a few major tweaks, but on the whole, doesn’t mess with success.

And while Mozilla’s Firefox has garnered a great deal of popular fanfare and a loyal coterie of followers, Microsoft’s IE7 shows that it still hasn’t thrown in the towel. Not only is Internet Explorer still the chosen browser for most businesses, but Redmond’s programmers seem to have taken a hint from their rival’s popularity and added a number of clever, if not innovative features.

IE7 now has tabbing, improved security, better RSS functionality, a bright new interface, and an upgraded search. It still doesn’t offer extensions and similar add-ons, but it does offer smooth integration with all of Microsoft’s other products, which is a very important feature as far as businesses are concerned. (It also has the advantage of being an automatic upgrade unless they block it, most IE6 users are going to become IE7 users whether they planned to or not.)