asquithea - 7:14 am on Mar 17, 2004 (gmt 0)

Personally, I wouldn't say it's that much faster than IE. Maybe there are a few little areas in which it beats the opposition in speed terms, but they are fairly insignificant in my opinion. It does feel more responsive in general, though.

Support for the latest standards, on the other hand, is way better than IE, and even better than Opera. There's also proper theming support, and a capability for extensions and customization that seems to be better than anything else out there.

Just to pick a few examples that I use:
* The Adblock extension can block even downloading of pretty much anything (including flash), and can kill something as a one-off with the swipe of a mouse. Even a simple CSS ruleset blocks just about everything with no effort.
* There is a choice of mouse-gesture extensions, or none at all for people who hate them
* There's a lot more flexibility than Opera for toolbar customization. I have everything on one toolbar (alongside the menu), and just a few buttons.

Anyway, it's not perfect (the 0.8 release still has some bugs in the new download manager, for example), but there are plenty of reasons why I like it. Maybe somebody else here might too. There's a web page that gives some reasons to switch [mozilla.org].

Oh, and don't forget to check Burning Edge [squarefree.com] for updates. Most nightlies since December are more advanced than the 0.8 release.