Ever since Internet Explorer 7 came out of the depths of Microsoft the browser has tried to distance itself from the basic attitude to browsing that same with the Operating System. The reason for such a shift was from the underdog that likes to make itself known as the underdog, Firefox!

Photo by Brett Taylor. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

I don’t want to get started on the browser wars in too much depth, but Firefox completely trounces the efforts made by Microsoft to create a browser. As much as people like to tout Open Source as the reason for its success the average user does not give a shit who was behind the code and development of your browser, nor do they care that “mIcRo$oFt” is an evil monopoly that makes you wake up at 3am in a cold sweat every night. The reason for its success is FEATURES! Not only does its basic toolset beat IE hands down, but anything you could possibly want added on can be! I recently decided that I needed a dictionary extension for Firefox whilst reading some eBooks, so after five minutes I was met by around ten different choices to choose from! Not only that, but before the time of IE7 Firefox was the first mainstream browser to introduce tabbed browsing by default.

One of the reasons I use Firefox is out of principle. The majority of websites on the Internet have been scripted very badly, and the broken standards introduced by IE are mostly to blame. Firefox isn’t exactly perfect in the standards department, but it’s a thousand strides in front of IE!

Firefox, whilst still not having the largest share of the market right now, is dominating Internet Explorer with sheer user love. Not many IE users love their browser and choose to spend the majority of their time within it, but Firefox users often wish that the faithful browser could be with them for every other task they wish to do, including email, documents, you name it, the Internet now wants to become part of it.

Eventually, all the bells and whistles will have been tried out, and what browsers will need to focus on is improving what they currently do, and that’s when standards could win the war. What future does this leave Firefox if IE is still the majority holder of users?

After a quick search on Google I was able to uncover a tool named ExplorerXP that allows a tabbed interface over the basic Windows Explorer on Windows Operating Systems. Being a fan of tabbed interfaces I decided to download it, and then decided not to. Why bother using this when Firefox can be used instead! Using the IE Tab extension I was able to integrate Windows Explorer into Firefox and use tabbed browsing to navigate all of my files in one window.

Whilst this method was ingenius (and thought of before, so if you find this don’t give me credit for it) it only made me long for a real replacement for Explorer. In many ways Firefox has taken the number one spot on the browser podium, but why not create an extension that branches out Firefox into the desktop browsing world? A few are in the works but seem to have been discontinued, which is a shame! Firefox has great potential to take over the desktop and provide an experience for browsing files that hasn’t been achieved since the first taste of GUI and/or the command line interface.