Mozilla Firefox runs on a variety of Windows operating systems, including Windows 98 through XP, as well as on Mac OS X and several varieties of Linux, including Red Hat Linux 8.0. By comparison, to get the latest version of Internet Explorer 6.0, you must already be running Windows XP SP2; if you're not, you'll have to pay about $99 for your operating system upgrade. Microsoft no longer offers new versions of IE as standalone downloads. The hardware requirements for Firefox are minimal. PCs require only an Intel Pentium II or AMD K6 processor, and Macs need a PowerPC 604e 266MHz, with 64MB of RAM and 52MB of drive space.

It took us about 2 minutes to download the Firefox installer, and we had our browser up and running in less than 10 minutes. The Mozilla Organization offers a number of tools to ease the transition from Internet Explorer. For example, the application asked us if we wanted to import our bookmarks from IE, then did so with aplomb.

Most of the Firefox interface labels are intuitive, although users may need to learn a few different menu terms from those in IE: Options instead of Internet Options, Cache instead of Internet Files. In fact, at a glance, Firefox looks and works almost exactly like Internet Explorer.

Perhaps the most noticeable interface difference from IE is the addition of a customizable search bar built into the Firefox menu bar. Although Google, Yahoo, and others offer plug-in search bars for Internet Explorer, the Firefox search bar is much more flexible, allowing you to add not only other search engines but Amazon.com, eBay.com, Dictionary.com, and even IMDB.com

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