ZDNet UK News: Firefox 'passes 20 percent market share' in Europe ZDNet UK News: Firefox 'passes 20 percent market share' in Europe

Mozilla Firefox has achieved an market share of over 20 percent in Europe, according to the latest figures released by French Web metrics firm XiTi.

I have been a Mozilla fan for a long time. Partly it is because I moved to Netscape after Mosaic, and Netscape utilizes Mozilla's Gecko rendering agent. Essentially, they are fairly close together. I still prefer Mozilla over Firefox (browsing) and Thunderbird (email) because it is integrated. However, I did run Thunderbird for awhile because it automatically rebuilds indices and switching back and forth between Mozilla and Netscape over the years made a number of local files unreadable due to screwed up index files. But, I am back to Mozilla.

I prefer Mozilla over Microsoft's IE because:
- Much better security. Whenever I run IE, I can expect to pick up spyware/adware almost immediately. The latest version of IE does have a popup blocker, but I don't know how well it works yet.
- Tabbed browsing. I typically run two or three browser windows, each with up to maybe eight tabs open at once. Much easier to organize this way. Plus, you can collect and save open documents, and then reopen all of them at once later. I thus have one button that opens up the eight web (mostly blog) sites that I follow closely.
- Personal tool bar. This is much superior to the IE favorites button, which everyone and their grandmother tries to update whenever you install software, or even, sometimes, view web sites.
- Ease of extension. I have some dozen extensions installed. They are easy to install, and add nice functionality. One I use is "mouse gestures" which translate mouse movements into whatever you want to do. The standard ones are such things as reloading windows, going to the next tab, etc. Also, I have the IP address in the lower right corner of the browser window, and can do a "whois" on it very simply. Makes it easy to check to see if sites are who they say they are.
- Ease of maintaining cookies, passwords, etc.
- Ease of modifying configuration. Not just the standard parameters through the preferences menus, but all of them using "about:config". I used to edit the javascript containing them, but about:config is so much easier and cleaner. Plus, you can find documentation for them. Also, it is easy to move configurations between machines, profiles, etc., and then update what you want (the javascript is easier for mass file name changes). I should also note that this allows me to actually share configurations, etc. between users and computers. I currently use the same configuration, mail files, etc. between several users on three different computers. Since there is only one of me, this is rarely an exclusivity issue.
- Mozilla deserves to win this one. Their browsers, etc. are free and open, supported by a very dedicated user community. As a result, I think it is a better product. Also, it reduces MSFT's monopoly power.