Since the relative demise of Netscape as the last serious competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) three years ago, most of us simply take our Microsoft browser for granted--warts and all. Virtually every Web site is optimized for IE, and every copy of Microsoft Windows sold includes a version of IE. And with total market saturation come opportunists: criminal hackers who use Microsoft vulnerabilities to take control of your operating system, steal your identity, or spread spam.

But out of the ashes of Netscape came the Mozilla Organization. Spun off from AOL, which purchased Netscape a few years ago, the Mozilla Organization has been quietly creating a brand-new Internet browser from the ground up--and sharing its code with anyone and everyone. The benefit of this new browser project is that unlike IE, this open-source code runs independently of your operating system, so a flaw in the browser software won't necessarily expose your entire computer.

Another source of Internet vulnerabilities lies within ActiveX technology, tiny scripts that automatically download when you visit certain Web pages. In most cases, they're good, adding music or animation to a page. But in some cases, criminal hackers have tweaked the code to damage your computer. Microsoft recently added a prompt to IE so that you can accept or deny ActiveX scripts. Firefox doesn't use ActiveX technology, which means that a few Web sites might not appear as their designers intended (although we were hard-pressed to find a site that didn't work because of this during our testing of Firefox).

While Mozilla offers a whole suite of secure, independent, open-source Internet tools, it recently streamlined its browser component and named it Firefox. Since last summer, we've been testing Firefox, and, frankly, we're sold: Firefox is just as fast and just as easy as Internet Explorer--and more importantly, it's much more secure.

And feature by feature, Firefox either matches or surpasses IE.

*Going forward, Microsoft will upgrade only the versions of Internet Explorer running on Windows XP SP2. The last standalone version of Internet Explorer 6 will work on versions of Windows up through Windows XP SP1.