I've been using Mozilla Firefox almost exclusively as my web browser for the past two years or so, and rarely find the need to use anything else.  If you ask me to compare browsers, Firefox and Opera would be almost equally placed, with Internet Explorer 6 being inferior to both.  Apart from the tabbed browsing available in these browsers, the customisability and the user-friendly features make for a far better browsing experience than using IE.  Security-wise, Firefox and Opera provide a much better alternative than IE — I've even observed in one browsing centre that Firefox is installed as the default browser, but with its icon on the desktop renamed to "Internet Explorer", so as to make all visitors use it, even those who are less familiar with computers.  Strangely, at office, only IE 6 is available; and our company's internal portal doesn't work in Firefox at all — Firefox says the site's security certificate is invalid, and refuses to load it.

Anyway, I've been hearing about the long-awaited release of Firefox 2 for a while now, but I was perfectly happy using Firefox 1.5.0.7.  But then, I came across this Slashdot story, which talked about Firefox 2 getting more than 2 million downloads within its first 24 hours of release (with the peak download rate being more than 30 downloads per second!) — and decided that I would also upgrade.  I am currently using Firefox 2 — I like the improved tab handling and the enhanced visual style that it offers.  So far everything's working fine and I've experienced no issues with this version.  I'm also pleasantly surprised at the non-intrusiveness of the integrated spell-checker (I've not needed one as I'm careful with spellings).

I wonder how many downloads it has crossed by now.  Anyway, as many have pointed out, the recently released Ubuntu Linux 6.10 (Edgy Eft) also includes Firefox 2, so when calculating the number of downloads of the browser, one would also need to add the number of downloads of Eft to that!  I'm currently downloading Eft myself, and while I am happy with using Windows XP on my laptop, I wouldn't mind giving this a try, considering that I can run it from the CD itself.