As Microsoft's marketing mavens gear up to blitz the world on 30th Jan with the debut of the new Vista operating system, a lot of folks are getting a glimpse of things to come by downloading  the new Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Web browser.

Ironically, the release of IE 7 seems to be prompting a significant number of people to take a look at the competing free browser from Mozilla.org called "Firefox" that is now offering its 2.0.1 version.

For IE folks, Microsoft's significant new feature now allows "tabbed" browsing, which lets you keep a string of Web pages, each available by clicking on its tab at the top of the display.

You can call up a main page showing your stock prices and then open new tabs for a page showing research on individual companies. You can also store a string of blogs, one after the other, ready to scan at will without downloading again. Tabs have been in Firefox for years.

Best of Both Worlds
Naturally, all of this has generated a bit of contention among users of Microsoft Windows where Firefox fans put down IE, and users of IE 7 said they don't want to bother with changing anything on their computers that is working.

There's an awful lot to be gained by going through the refreshingly simple download and installation of Firefox 2 and running it alongside IE, which comes installed as part of Windows.

You'll get two advantages with dual browsers. Most significantly, you'll be amazed and pleased to learn about the great number of add-ons and extensions to Firefox that can let you do near-miraculous stuff that Microsoft either doesn't want you to do or doesn't seem to know how to do in its own right.

If One Crashes, the Other Remains
First, a relatively pedestrian benefit that can be had by running both browsers side by side: Dual browsers are better in many ways than just a line of tabs for the sake of sanity alone. The browsers' interfaces look very different so you can purse one type of stuff in one and do totally different work in the other.

One browser can be used for serious research and study while the other browser can be used for stuff that seems at the leading edge and that might mess up the current session.Anybody who's ever grazed their way through a herd of wildly different blogs with strange graphics, nasty sounds and weird text will appreciate the peace of mind knowing that if that browser crashes it probably will leave the other one intact.

A good example is to use IE 7 to do the fact-checking while writing a newspaper column and use a Foxfire display alongside to play videos from YouTube  and Google

Contrasting Displays
Dual browser scheme can be employed to keep things like serious news-gathering separate from the chaos of Web sites where nobody checks facts and everybody shoots from the hip.  Firefox in turn can be used to display something different than the IE screen by installing a skin add-on that changes the colors from Microsoft aqua to black.

Bottling the Stream
Now, consider using Firefox to view Web-streamed movies while working alongside in IE. This adds both power and enjoyment for whoever sits between the chair and the keyboard.

Foxfire's promoters at Mozilla.org are touting a set of additional software that captures the actual video from those movies streaming from YouTube et al., as large computer files stored on your hard drive and available for playing when and where you choose.

This video add-on is called. When you first install Firefox, you'll be shown the way to scores of these additional feature tools for the browser. You can also find them on the Mozilla site.

This video gem of add-on, amounts to a small part of what can be expected in the wake of an agreement between Mozilla and Adobe Systems that lets amateur programmers build programs that will play files in Adobe's proprietary Flash Video (FLV) format.

This makes it possible to download Web video clips and then incorporate them in PowerPoint presentations or as offerings on one's own blog or Web site.

Source: linuxinsider