Using Firefox add-ons can be a double-edged sword however in that they are mostly created by third-party developers. And to give you a greater perspective on this, the next three browsers down on the list at the time (Mozilla, Netscape and Opera) were registering less than 5% in browser usage share combined.Īdd to this the fact that Firefox 1 was highly customizable compared with its mighty counterpart of the time, Internet Explorer 6, which could be hardly customized at all, and you can understand why Firefox has now started to overtake Internet Explorer in many browser statistics reports including that for Iron Spider. And although it didn't pioneer it, Firefox was certainly the first browser to introduce tabbed browsing to many (myself included) as it took only a short year for Firefox to register a 23.6% share in browser usage reports (according to the W3schools browser statistics page). It also featured tabbed browsing, which at the time was a fairly new concept. Here's an excellent discussion about the origin of tabbed browsing. This encourages a new kind of web browsing experience where instead of continually drilling down to the next web page effectively replacing the previous page as you surf the net (a.k.a., depth-first browsing), you open 'across' by laying out a succession of tabs (breadth-first browsing) the latter of which lends itself much better to power-surfing. You switch between pages by clicking on tabs displayed along the top of your browser. Tabbed browsing allows the user to open hyperlinks on a web page in a new browser 'tab', essentially a new page in the same browser window.

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