And Our Product of the Year is (Drum Roll, Please...)

I have to agree with you. Firefox changed all the rules. A great product. It's options for personalization are certainly what have lead to it's growing adoption.

My other choice is really not a 2005 product, but it has really come into it's own this year, and that is BitTorrent. Another product that is changing everything.

2BrightSparks SyncBackSE - I got the headsup on this from PCW, downloaded it, installed it, love it. It really is one of those applications where you just keep saying to yourself, "They really have thought of everything here!" Good see it in the Awards.

Firefox definitely deserved its place, and I would also include quite a few of its (optional) extensions in there. "Easy Mouse Gestures" is my current rave.

yeah, i totally agree. i have used firefox for over 6 months now and no more crashing! i love it! espeically the tabbed browsing... man. gotta love. good to see it up on no.1.

I really love Firefox! I'm using it right now. It is awesome!

Hmm, I don't see the appeal. To me, you shouldn't EVER have to switch from one browser to another when you're on the internet, but when you encounter one of the many pages Firefox can't display or won't display correctly, that's exactly what you have to do. Also, there are multiple browsers out there that do the same thing Firefox does without having to add numerous extensions.

Yeah, it's cool, but I don't think it's as groundbreaking as people make it out to be.

Get a life

MS has issues with IE - and although I'm certain to get it when the supposed release happens this summer, my faith is running low as the complexity of the product has lost it's former stability. Now, crashes are so frequent i really don't mind saving myself from the task mgr shutdowns and just using Firefox. And tonight, when i agreed to let the error reporting send it's datafile to microsoft, i experienced the ultimate black hole of error reporting after my IE crash. my error reporting crashed as it was sending. the program actually read

"Error Reporting (Not Responding)"

at the top.

Five frustrating minutes later, IE was shut down, my OS taskbar blinked as it restarted, and i elected to not use IE the rest of the night - nay the rest of the summer until the 7.0 is released.

PS - if PCWorld would like a copy of my crashed error reporting screenshot -email me and i'll forward it on.

Firefox isn't that great (although its my browser of choice), its just that IE hasn't really evolved significantly in terms of features in the last 8 years. thats a long time in IT.

Or use Maxthon or Avant and get what IE should be and what users of Firefox have to add extensions to get.

IE is imbedded into the OS - whether you use it or not, you still need to keep it updated to ensure your computer is as secure as MS can make it. And all MS Office products will default to IE when multi-tasking. If that's the case, you might as well stick with the IE engine and simply find a better browser that uses it at a fraction of the size of an alternative.

Firefox / IE, Microsoft / Apple - there are no right answers....

I installed Firefox because of all the hype. Two days later it crashed on my continuously. I went back to Internet Explorer. Sure the features were cool, but you can't enjoy those cool features in a crash.

I use Firefox, and find it easy to use and reliable.

But, what happened to BugMeNot???

Yeah, I'm not some fanboy saying Firefox=suck IE=pwns!!1! I'm just saying that every browser has its fair share of flaws, and I feel that sometimes people get caught up in the hype and choose to not mention or overlook Firefox's flaws. Numerous other browsers share Firefox and IE's features. Maxthon, Slimbrowser, Avant, Netscape, etc.

I think FireFox's major contribution is that in finally made MS get off their butts and start improving their product. When you have 95% share or better, and the product is already free, there's no reason to improve it. I thank Firefox for IE7 coming early!

I've been an IT professional for 7 years and am currently a support technician for Ford Motor Company here in the Detroit area. I definitely don't know everything, but this discussion is barely worth having. I've been running Firefox (formerly Phoenix, formerly Firebird) for over 14 months on six of the machines on my home network and on my work pc. I'm here to tell you that it never crashes for me and I cannot honestly remember the last web page I had any problems with including my bank and all of Ford's wierd proprietary pages. If you're having issues it's you, sorry. It's developed past all of it's major early problems. Nevermind it's resistance to spyware. Tell me you like hot fudge more than carrots, but don't try n tell me it's healthier.
>>>--Tiribulus-> Detroit

Firefox hasn't worked out at all for me. I tried giving it a fair shot, but I've constantly caught it using an unacceptable amount of resources (100+ MB). It has also crashed constantly, much more so than IE. I tried reinstalling it several times, but it hasn't improved.

I still have to use it because it has the nifty "force increase text size" feature for my ailing eyesight, but other than that, it couldn't have been farther from the breakthrough product it is made to be. There's nothing wrong with my computer. It has only crashed (as in blue screened) me once and that was my fault. FF isn't as bulletproof as it should be, but there's always room for improvement, and it's a step in the right direction.

The heck? Why did it censor out f-a-r-t-h-e-r? PC World, you gotta loosen up the censor because it's catching substrings in perfectly fine words!

To me, the people that say that Firefox or IE "crashes" their system aren't to be taken into account when debating the worth of said browsers. Plus, it's "resistance to spyware" is mostly because it simply doesn't do ActiveX. Whether that's a "feature" is dubious.

I do agree, though, that it's biggest contribution is kicking Microsoft in its ass a bit to get it to modernize IE. Remember, Opera had tabs first.

Phil, may i point out one thing. IE renders pages in its own M$ way. The actual coding guidelines by the W3C is rendered by Firefox. So the sites that don't display are the fault of M$ and the companies programming their sites. Yahoo! told us a while ago that they will begin making everything firefox ready. One step forward. Until M$ wakes up and takes IE out of the core OS, I will use FF as much as possible.

To those about the crashes and memory leaks, Dear Park (Firefox 1.1 alpha's name) was released and fixes these. I have experiecned crashes and memoryleaks too but it hasn't kept me down.

8 months ago I began using FF as a second browser on a trial basis. Since that time, I built a new computer and use FF exclusively. It is far superior to IE in every way but especially the ease of tabbed browsing. My only concern is that its popularity grows to the point it becomes a virus target.

Tiribulus' comments are hilarious!

An important fact that no one ever mentions is that Mozilla products are available in fully portable versions, while MS products are difficult or impossible to make fully portable on a flash drive.

On my USB flash drive, I run Portable Firefox, Portable Thunderbird, and Portable Sunbird (calendar).

SyncBack allows me to sync the profiles of the portable versions with those on my home computer when I return from a trip.

With this totally free set up, I can take my bookmarks, handy email client including locally stored mail, and my calendar with me on my USB drive and use them on any XP computer without leaving a trace.

Beats IE and Outlook any day of the week.

Yes, I am aware of M$'s flouting of the W3C standards. Still, though, Opera's battle cry has always been W3C compliance.

I've tried Firefox and Opera, and it always felt like I was making excuses for their shortcomings. In contrast, I'd go back to IE, and it'd JUST WORK. No bells and whistles, but it just worked. Then I finally found the compromise in Maxthon (MyIE2 at the time). It could display everything IE could (because it basically is IE) but it had tons of bells and whistles.

It's cool if Firefox works for some people, and it's also cool if some people don't mind having to use two browsers (which is what you have to do if Firefox won't display a page). Personally, I'm happy just bypassing all the hype and using what JUST WORKS.

Definitely Firefox is a far superior browser to IE. Being a Webmaster myself I know. Firefox has less vulnerabilities, easier to use for programmers, and it's just a hell of a lot more fun!

I enjoy surfing the web (the entire web) with Firefox, not only because of numerous aforementioned advantages, but also because of it's disintegration with Windows. When IE crashed, odds were even the whole system would go down, too. The one time Firefox crashed, it was reasonable (I had 50+ pages up on 128MB of memory, for crying out loud), and I kept everything I was working on.

And, it's free! I don't have to go splurge on XP just to get the latest upgrade.

I think Firefox is an excellent choice for the average user, but I also share the disappointment of a few users of Firefox. I first used it during its 1.01 release and yes it didn't render pages correctly, and after a while its user interface was gone from the memory, leaving me with a number of weird icons and "all over the place" menus. I couldn't shut it down, and it sucked. I thought of abandoning it completely but than, I decided to re try it two months ago. I was unbelievably impressed by the difference. Page rendering was completely correct, and all the issues were fixed. I don't know about other people's problems, but I never got one single spyware down to my machine by using Firefox, even when I'm a regular guest at donwload, warez, abandonware and file sharing sites. Thank you, Firefox you saved me a lot of wasteful time cleaning up my computer. By the way, anyone who said that IE just works can't be taken seriously. IE doesn't just work, it works without your knowledge. What about all the automated features like ActiveX that IE6 had. It got me at least 3 different spyware programs to my computer. IE's automation processes just make a mess rather than do good.

I noticed you ranked the Alienware Aurora desktop computer as the #1 computer. I'm glad its a desktop and not their Area-51 you ranked high up. Because their laptops SUCK!