FEBRUARY 2007 MAXIMUMPC
S
ome of the greatest fi ghts are
never televised on pay-per-view.
Veteran enthusiasts still talkabout the knockout punch that abruptly
ended 3dfx’s career, and who can for-
get a younger, leaner Sound Blaster
thumping AdLib to take the audio
crown? But lest we get caught reminisc-
ing, we’re now witnessing a fi ght more
than 10 years in the making! That’s
right, we’re talking about the browser
battle between Mozilla’s Firefox and
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
This isn’t the fi rst time IE has been in
a high-profi le scuffl e. Netscape proved
to be a formidable opponent in the
early 1990s, and while neither contes-
tant gnawed anyone’s ear off, many
accused Microsoft of hitting below the
belt when the company integrated IE
with Windows. Knocked to the canvas,
Netscape offered one fi nal haymaker by
releasing its source code to the pub-
lic, which eventually gave birth to the
Firefox browser.
Combining improved security,
open-source support, and tabbed
browsing, Firefox has fi rmly estab-
lished itself as a legitimate threat to
IE’ s crown. With the release of version
2.0 and an ever-growing user base,
Mozilla would like nothing more than
to solidify the Fox as the people’s
browser and reap the advertising
rewards. But you can’t count Microsoft
out. Finally responding to the chal-
lenge, Microsoft has thrown a much-
improved IE7 into the ring. So pull up
a chair ringside as we determine which
browser will take home the title!