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For several years, Mozilla's Firefox has been steadily gaining ground on its more established rival Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Despite the fact that its development is entirely open-sourced, the project has consistently introduced innovative ways to improve the safety and functionality of the browser that you use to surf the internet.

These positive changes have given Mozilla a platform to develop its browser further and its popularity continues to increase. The Firefox browser is downloaded over 500,000 times a day and the project currently enjoys around 12% of the market share. So why should you choose Mozilla Firefox over its more established rival. Quite simply, it is a better browser.

Due to the popularity of the Firefox browser, Microsoft sought to combat this in its latest version of Internet Explorer by including some of Firefox's innovations such as tabbed browsing, an integrated search engine and a built in pop-up blocker. Nonetheless, Firefox still has many more benefits and Microsoft has as yet not built a browser that matches it.

So here are seven reasons why you should choose Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.

Firefox is a faster browser: Studies show that the internet explorer browser does not load a page quicker then Firefox. The latter uses fewer resources and can be tweaked to make the best use of the computer's capabilities.

Firefox is a safer browser: Despite the many improvements made in the latest version of Internet Explorer (version 7), there are still many security issues related to the browser. Firefox does not use Active X, which can easily be manipulated to spread viruses and spyware. Although Firefox is not completely safe, its track record demonstrates that its developers consider browser security as paramount.

Firefox makes it easier to manage downloads: The Firefox download manager is great because not only does it organize the download information in a single place but you can also pause the download and start it again at a later convenient time.

Firefox is fully customizable: Because Firefox is open source, the browser is capable of being completely flexible. You can change the theme of the browser, design and attach plug-ins that you choose and you can block images. The plug-ins available are great. You can add spell checkers, translators and many other useful applications.

Firefox enables you to clear your data easily: Unlike Internet Explorer, the Firefox browser allows you to easily delete all of your private data by pressing one single button. Alternatively, the Internet Explorer browser requires you to manual select cookies, temporary internet files and history in order to clear the data. If you have been using the browser for a long period without clearing it then this can be a cumbersome task.

Firefox gives you comprehensive page data: There is a cool tool built in to Mozilla Firefox that allows you to bring up the data about the current website that you are visiting. You can visit the links that are present, the date the page was last modified and other interesting information. Firefox will also allow you to view the source code for the website. This is great for web developers.

Firefox allows you to block images: Should you visit a site that has lots of images on it, for example adverts then Firefox allows you to block any images specific to that site. This is great as it improves the speed that it takes for the website to load. Internet Explorer does not have this functionality.