Volume VIII, No. 2, 2007 478 Issues in Information Systems INTERNET EXPLORER AND FIREFOX: WEB BROWSER FEATURES COMPARISION AND THEIR FUTURE Siwat Saibua, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, siwat.saibua@tamuk.edu Joon-Yeoul Oh, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, joon-yeoul.oh@tamuk.edu Richard A. Aukerman, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, richard.aukerman@tamuk.edu ABSTRACT Internet technology is one of the utmost inventions of our era and has contributed significantly in distributing and collecting data and information. Effectiveness and efficiency of the process depends on the performance of the web browser. Internet Explorer is the leader of the competitive browser market with Mozzilla Fox as its strongest rival, which has been and is gaining a substantial level of popularity among internet users. Choosing the superlative web browser is a difficult task due to the considerably large selection of browser programs and lack of tangible comparison data. This paper describes and compares vital features of Internet Explorer and Mozzilla Firefox, which represent over 90% of the browser market. The performance of each browser is evaluated based on the general features, operating system support, browser features, protocol support and language support. The paper is concluded with concrete remarks based on the comparison. Keywords: Information Technology (IT), Web Browser, Software Evaluation, Internet Protocol, Search Engines, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, INTRODUCTION A web browser is a software program that allows accessing of information on the internet. Followed by the WorldWideWeb software that was written by Tim Berners-Lee and released to the public in 1991, numerous web browsers have been developed and released to the market. As a result, the Internet users have multiple web browsers to choose from which presents the unavoidable question of “Which is the best browser in the market?” Regardless of web browser developers’ efforts to remain competitive in the market, the life of web browsers is rather short. Unlike most browsers, including Netscape, Internet Explorer (IE) that was developed by Microsoft in 1995 has remained most popular among internet users. Next to Netscape, which was introduced to the market in 1998, Mozilla Firefox was released in 2004 to compete with IE. The software codes of Firefox are in the open source format, and any software developers around the world can put their own ideas into this browser. As a result, Firefox’s performance effectiveness and efficiency improved every day and gained popularity rapidly. 70.00% 80.00% 90.00% 100.00% Feb. 06 Feb. 07 Firefox IE Figure 1: Market shares between IE and Firefox According to netapplications.com, headquartered in Aliso Viejo, CA, the market share of Internet Explorer has declined to 79.09% while that of Firefox has been increased to 14.18% of the global usage share by February 2007 [4]. Opera, Apple's Safari, Netscape and others make up the rest. Figure 1 shows that Firefox’s growth of 45.44% while Internet Explorer’s decreased its market share by 6.99% within a year. In Europe, IE’s market share is even less than in the US. For example, in Germany, Firefox’s market share was 39.02% while IE’s was 55.99% as of July 2006, which is about a double of global usage share rate. By January 2007, Germany’s Firefox users dropped to 25.66% with the usage rate for IE increasing to 69.47% [10]. The global market share of Firefox, on January 2007, had decreased to 13.67% from 14.00% on December 2006 [4]. However, the difference is not significant enough to impact the global usage share of FireFox, and in February 2007, Firefox’s market share started to https://doi.org/10.48009/2_iis_2007_478-483