Firefox used to be streets ahead of IE6 in terms of built-in facilities eg tabs but with IE7 MS have copied most of the good bits so I doubt there's that much difference now.
If you find tabs to be an advantage, I suppose... personally I see them as a disadvantage. No other piece of software on my PC uses tabs, everything else has convenient buttons on my toolbar. Tabs just introduce another place I have to look to switch between views... and unlike my toolboar, they can get hidden under other open windows. Honestly, how is that a good feature? I'm prefectly happy with non-tabbed IE6.
In terms of security, FF has always been regarded as better, especially with all the add ons you can get. I don't know what's available for IE7, if anything. Firefox has always allowed you to control cookies and what software gets installed - again I don't know what IE7 does.
IE6 allows you to control cookies and what what software gets installed. So did IE5, as I recall.
Accpeted wisdom is that FireFox security is better, but I wonder how much of that is due to less hackers attacking FireFox because it isn't important enough to be worthwhile? As its market share grows, so will the security exploits.
If you want a fast browser then neither is the best, Opera is supposed to be faster.
I don't know about speed but Opera was always a better standards-compliant browser than anything else around (with the possible exception of Amaya). The only hit against Opera is that it costs money, otherwise I'd probably recommend it myself.
The add-ons really make Firefox better. Looking down my list, I'm currently using 14 extensions. The best has got to be Scrapbook which allows me to take perfect copies of web pages (eg online receipts) and organise them into a hierarchy of folders.
Is that any better than IE's "Save page" facility (which allows you to take perfect copies of web pages)?
Adblock stops those annoying "Sponsered Links" amongst others.
You can get ad-blocker extensions for IE, though I've never bothered so I don;t know how good they are.
Security-wise I use Flashblock and NoScript. It can be slightly annoying when I go to a new site and find that everything is being blocked but I'd far rather control what Javascript is allowed to run on my PC, and Flash is just plain insecure at the moment unless Adobe have sorted out all the problems with it.
Yes, you can do that in IE too.
Plus you've got themes which allow you to change the look of the browser - I'm using Red Cats (blue flavour).
Ok... I suppose that might be important... to some people...
With Mozilla there's also a chance that we ordinary users can have some feedback into the design process. I use their Sunbird calendar program and was able to get involved a year or 2 ago in the online discussion about how the snooze facility for alarms should work. Can't imagine MS doing that!
Do you know how big Microsoft's user group testing, focus groups, beta tests, etc., are? They don't just sit in an ivory tower thinking up new ways to torment us, you know. (Though I've still got no idea how some of the hare-brained ideas in Office 2007 got through user testing!)
Oh, and that's the final thing I've got against IE - Microsoft
You see, I quite like Microsoft.
