But Firefox is beginning to show signs of the problems many people attribute to Microsoft, primarily an inability to innovate. Look at Firefox 2.0. Can you name a single major feature -- a single new one -- that's in the browser? The interface hasn't changed and looks dated. RSS support remains pitiful; Live Bookmarks is unusable. Mozilla hasn't even bothered to improve tab handling by adding Quick Tabs-like functions. Put simply, the browser feels old and tired. Except for extension support, which is superior to Internet Explorer's support for add-ins, IE beats it hands-down.

Bottom line

You'll no doubt be reading about Firefox, Opera and Safari in the rest of this group review, and you'll be gauging what each reviewer says about each browser to help you decide which is best.

But there's a better way to decide. Just look at the numbers -- and numbers don't lie. Internet Explorer has over an 80% market share, and that won't change any time soon. People are smart enough to download competing browsers if they're not happy with IE. The evidence shows that they've been happy. And with all the improvements in IE7, from RSS reading to tabbed browsing to security, they'll be happier still.

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