The just released Mozilla Firefox 2 may be better than Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 7, but you'll probably want to use both:

TABS  - IE7 now boasts tabs for browsing, which has been integral to Firefox for a while. Tabbed browsing allows you to open multiple websites in a single window, reducing screen clutter. It's well intended, but I don't really think it's all that. My main complaint pertains to both both IE7 and Firefox: when multiple sites are open in a single window, that window bears the label of the website on top. The other open sites are, in essence, hiding behind it. You will see all the tabs if you click on the window, but if you have many other open windows, it might take you a while to find what you want. At least in Firefox 2, if you don't see a tab and accidentally close it, you can go to the "recently closed tabs" menu and pull it back quick.

SAFETY - Phishing filters are more crucial, and tend to be of great help to the less savvy web surfers. Phishing is the malicious art of capturing people's personal information by making them think they're at one website-a bank or favorite shopping site-when they're really at another. Microsoft and Mozilla have created constantly updated databases of known or suspected phishing sites. Both browsers employ those databases to block a user from surfing into danger. The feature is invisible if you are in safe waters, but when you land on a phishing website, the browser will alert you.

In related news, SecurityFocus reports an unpatched highly critical vulnerability in Firefox 2.0. This defect has been known since June 2006 but no patch has yet been made available. The developers claimed to have fixed the problem in 1.5.0.5 according to Secunia, but the problem still exists in 2.0 according to SecurityFocus. If security is the main reason users should switch to Firefox, how do we explain known vulnerabilities remaining unpatched across major releases?