It was about 1998 I believe. To be honest I am not too fussed about IE being bundled with Windows now. I do however support Opera's suit against Microsoft that they get their browser to follow HTML standards.
I use both. There are some advantages in using Firefor, though. For example, Mozilla Firefox is able to keep the html format when copying from a webpage to a text file.
The first version of IE that was not a rebranded Spyglass Mosaic was version 3 in mid-late 1996. Firefox is just a newcomer. Opera came out before them as a standalone browser. Maybe a timeline will help - http://www.foxkeh.com/downloads/history/history-original.pdf
well most of the folks love the FF here on account of all the add-ons and so on but for me, that stuff just bogged it down too much!
This just shows that your greatest ally can be an OS developer and your greatest enemy can also be an OS developer. Take Real Player as an example.
Given the choice of IE6 vs Firefox, I would say firefox any day of the week. Given the choice of IE7 and Firefox, I would say both. I use both for different sites. I like them both, but do most of my forum posting and stuff like that in IE7. If I'm just reading articles and things like that online, I will use Firefox.
I am always with IE7 when I am surfing internet. Even I have posted a complete review on IE7..and IE7 addons on my site. http://www.techhunt.org/ie/ie7_review http://www.techhunt.org/ie/addons
MSN Explorer!!! OMG. Did I just say that? That was so wrong. No wait. I have an even better one... the AOL Browser. LMAO.
I can't wait till IE8 comes out. I konw its around the corner because FF3 is currently out of beta only for developers according to Cnet. SO I expect Microsoft to follow suit soon.
Depends on what you are loading. Generally FF loads regular pages faster. But pages that require a lot of plugins that is IE territory. Check a myspace site for an example.
Opera all the way, simply put it just works better than anything else out there. It suffers from NO problems at all.