[Larwee]

I have a very big interest in alternative browsers and like many people, Firefox is my favorite among the alternative browsers. But I will have things to say about some of the others in the coming weeks and months.

According to OneStat.com, which is a Web analytics firm, Firefox now has passed 15% of the browser market and continues to gain ground.

The Firefox people probably make too much out of the number of downloads, which has now passed 200 million. Some people have downloaded several different versions of Firefox, some people cancel the download and some people download Firefox but almost never use it.

While there are plenty of us who like Firefox, there are those among us who would like to keep Firefox our own little secret. As it becomes more popular it becomes a malware target.

Microsoft was the big target when Internet Explorer had well over 90% of the browser market, and it still remains the biggest target. It isn't very logical to go after browsers that aren't used by many people.

Firefox has now seen its first serious malware exploit. It is named Infostealer.Snifula. It uses an exploit in the Firefox browser in the cross-platform component object models (XPCOMs). That is important because XPCOMs are used for developing the extensions, and the extentions have played a big role in making Firefox as popular as it is.

The good news is that the experts rate Infostealer.Snifula as a low threat because very few instances have been reported up until now.

Many Microsoft services are not compatible with Firefox. That has made a lot of people angry with Microsoft and it makes them look bad. To the surprise of some people, Microsoft is adding Firefox support to an adCenter upgrade scheduled for August 5, 2006.

Microsoft has Internet Explorer 7 on the horizon and that will be a very big improvement over what the current Interenet Explorer browser. Firefox will have Firefox 2.0 leading their charge against Internet Explorer.

While it is expected that Interenet Explorer 7 will have some fans, I haven't heard of any who are expecting it to spell the end of Firefox.

If you have any thoughts about any of this, please post them.