Firefox and Opera Fans Strike Back

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We had a huge response to our browser comparison article last month, with lots of suggestions. Now we address readers' concerns and requests, looking at printing, community features, search, compatibility issues, and more.

People are passionate about their browsers. It's one of those subjects like operating systems, political parties, and motorcycles, that can get people worked up?in this case it's in support of the web browsing software for which they're partisans. So as you can guess, we received a huge response to our New Browser Comparison. We had supporters of Opera and Firefox write in to tell us "Unfair!"

There were very few letters in support of Internet Explorer; the few that we got were mostly from IT folk who like that it supports most web apps and interactive sites, resulting in fewer user complaints. Even here at Ziff Davis Media, we use proprietary business systems that require Internet Explorer to fully function.

Here we highlight some of the hate mail and polite suggestions we've received and try to address the concerns expressed by readers. Given time and space constraints, along with the vast load of options and features in these fairly mature software packages, we necessarily didn't discuss every aspect of every browser, and we certainly couldn't make that claim this time around, either. What follows is an attempt to fill some of the bigger voids in the original article.

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