PCWorld has named [http://www.mozilla.org/firefox|Mozilla Firefox] as the [http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,120763,00.asp|prodcut of the year]. First time after Microsoft lanuched Internet Explorer in 1995, it is now losing the market. What is so great about Firefox? According to the review of [http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,118959,00.asp|PCWorld site] it is the security and tabbed browsing. [http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/default.mspx|IE7] also has tabbed browsing but it is still in beta. It also has RSS reader built-in, better protection against phishing etc. Fine. I am not a great expert to evaluate feature-by-feature in these areas. But I definitely can comment on areas which matters to us Indians a lot, ie., Indian language capabilities.
Let me explain briefely how Indian language web-sites are put-up. Majority people still use the true-type font based web-sites. They use the dynamic font technology wherein the client need not download the font into his/her system. Currently only Micorosft is providing the facility to create dynamic fonts by way of EOT file. This works on Windows and MS IE only. It was Bitstream and Netscape who pioneered the dynamic font technology but they later abandoned it. Now Microsoft IE is the only way out for Indian languages by way of dynamic fonts. Firefox does not support dynamic fonts. All these explanations apply to non-Unicode based truetype fonts. Coming to Unicode based opentype fonts, Firefox renders the fonts properly, but the client’s system should have the appropriate opentype font installed in his/her system. MS IE supports dynamic fonts for opentype fonts as well.
Thus for we Indians MS IE is the prefreed browser.
