The FoxFire browser itself is a streamlined affair, requiring a download of a little over 5MB. This standard core will do pretty much what you'd demand of such an application, and from there you're okay to carry on using it as is, or you can extend its feature base through some of the hundreds of extensions that are freely available.Yet that's the beauty of open source software, and don't Firefox devotees know it. New features are made available on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, and in use it's quicker than Internet Explorer 7 in the manner it goes its work.



Even from first execution, it gets down to business fast. Gone is Internet Explorer 7's requirement to check that your operating system is genuine before allowing you to install it, and in its place is the requirement for a few mouse clicks to get the program quickly up and running. When you run it the first time, you'll find bookmarks and settings seamlessly transfer across and the world seems good.Yet when the program starts, nothing much appears to have changed. Internet Explorer 7's interface is significantly altered from its previous iteration (to the point of requiring a little more reacquainting than expected), yet Firefox looks and feels the same. Sure, the assorted icons look a little smarter, but that seems to be it.

In use, for the most part, little has changed, though. The tabbed browsing is still excellent (and now pages open in fresh tabs, rather than windows, as a default), and a session restore feature will pick up where you left off should your system crash for any reason. But big, new, headline features are absent.Yet if earlier versions of Firefox were about introducing a different way to go about Web browsing, version 2 is more about the details that make things a little smarter.

Firefox's phishing protection is more subtle, for instance, although we felt IE7 had the slight edge here. We loved the new, integrated search box, which by default sits in the toolbar at the top right of the screen (though this is something that Opera has had for years).You can customise what search engine to point it at, but it simply allows you to type a search term directly into it, without having to, for argument's sake, track back to the Google homepage. Elsewhere, you have flexibility over handling of Web feeds, and spell-checking facilities are built in too.

Yet to criticise and praise individual facets of Firefox somewhat misses the point. Why? Because Firefox is built on user choice. You choose what bits to run, you decide what add-ons to incorporate, and you can customise pretty much any area of the browser's work. And while the user who is happy to accept the default settings isn't likely to grumble, were you to ignore the plethora of things you can do with Firefox, you'd really be missing out.

The biggest stroke against the browser? That there's still a surprising number of sites that struggle to properly accommodate it. That'll change over time, but particularly for those with online banking services, Internet Explorer 7 (or perhaps even version 6) is probably the best way to ensure full compatibility with the rest of the world. Though not, we'd wager, for long.