As other people said, it’s not really an either/or thing. Just give it a whirl yourself.
I hardly ever use IE if I can help it, but it’s not as if it isn’t still there in case I want to use it.
At the very least, the interface isn’t the eye-sore/complete mess that IE 7 is. 
I dig me some IE7. I rarely get pop ups, it’s got the phishing filter, which I tested by clicking on a suspect link in a sham email (it picked it up), and I do love me some tabbed browsing.
And…sometimes websites won’t run without it. Unfortunately, it’s the gold standard.
All of which Firefox has done since the get-go, although MS reviewers seem to think IE7 has a better phishing filter. I would never call IE7 the “gold standard”, anymore than I would call trailer parks the gold standard of housing.
What about trailer parks being the gold standard of being debris in the middle of a tornado?
And I’d still call IE the gold standard. Some websites won’t work with Firefox. They all work with Internet Explorer.
Read Lush Puppy’s post.
You are right, sometimes you have to use IE, or an IE plugin. I have to use IE to access my company’s time card system. Generally that is because of hard coded hacks to get things to work in IE without worrying about other browsers, or use of an insecure technology that other browsers do not support precisely because it is not secure.
IE is no more a gold standard than McDonalds. Both are ubiquitous, but that doesn’t make them golden. IE is just the lowest common denominator.
Have they fixed the saved passwords vulnerability in 2.0 yet? I won’t upgrade until I know that’s been fixed.
IE does not handle CSS very well at all. I know lots of “standards compliant” websites that cause IE to barf (or at least, render badly), whereas FF does not have a problem. I visit very few websites that have issues with non-IE browsers (although one Wireless router I configured required that 1 page use IE and another use FF - go figure).
The Gold Standard is W3C Validation - and open source renderers pass more rendering tests than IE. MS have tried to “Embrace and Extend” Web Standards for years, with tools that generate non-compliant HTML, but that battle is being lost, as more and more users step away from IE (for safety and other reasons) and Web developers recognise (indeed, embrace) this shift to maintain market share.
Si
Switched to firefox a month or two ago, like it a lot.
hijack/
How do I get it to print pages? If I am trying to print something, I have to go to IE to do it. There must be a simple solution, anyone care to enlighten me, please?
/hijack
Eh? I find Firefox prints better than IE - which typically crops about 1/3 of the page off the right hand margin.
If it’s a frames-based website, it might be necessary to click inside the frame you want before doing File>Print
You mean this one that affects both IE and FF, but is slightly worse for FF?
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/54413.html
The plan was to fix it in 2.0.0.1 or 2.0.0.2, which I believe are out, but I’m not sure. (I boot up into Linux this morning, and I only have 1.5.8 installed on Linux myself, so it is not a big issue for me.)
btw, this article reports a study that claims FF 2.0 is slightly better at blocking phishing than IE 7: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/linux-security/54280.html
Hmmm, why Firefox is better than IE–let me think… (4.2 nanoseconds of crickets chirping)
Tabbed browsing (with colorful tabs!) instead of fifty IE windows splashing all over my desktop.
Ctrl-F opens up a spiffy little taskbar area at the bottom of the window with a text bar in it–anything typed in there will be found on any of the tabs running–this is great when you need to find a specific search string in multiple sites, such as shopping for a very specific item or looking for a quote. The task bar has a close X on it, but I don’t HAVE to close it to navigate around it, unlike the annoying Windows Find utility window that has to be closed and reopened to let you navigate the page it’s searching.
Tabbed browsing. Yeah, IE7 has it, finally, but where do you think they got it?
The extensions. The torrent toolbar, text window to search fifty different sites for the targeted search parameters. The Foxy Tunes player controller that lets me mute Pandora with one button click at the bottom taskbar so I can listen to the YouTube video instead. The Gmail skin extension that makes it all green and pretty and has some other neat features. The StumbleUpon button that randomly finds a website related to a variety of subjects. The Shazou IP locator that tells me where the server lives of the web site I’m on. The email tracker that tells me which of my six Yahoo accounts have new mail in them so I don’t have to check them all. The weather widget. The IE tab button (although every site that FF < 2.0 had problems with 2.0 chews up like it ain’t no thing–haven’t had to use the IE tab extension much lately!) The FlashBlock. The AdBlock. The one click video downloader that lets me snag Google video and YouTube videos I want to save. The PDF downloader that lets me view .pdf’s as html in another tab, thereby saving me from having to download the damned things and allowing Adobe to wake from its leviathan slumbers (for about a month!) in order to read some stupid document. I could go on…
The purty skins that make the buttons larger and in colors I like–a small thing, but it’s nice to have my browsing environment suit my color and design preferences.
Did I mention the tabbed browsing?
How about the fact that Firefox paired with Thunderbird is about the best browser/newsreader combo that can be imagined, both with low overhead and most emphatically NOT inextricably embedded in my entire fucking OS?
It’s faster than IE. It’s more reliable than IE. It’s been months since I’ve had to deal with the “oops sorry, IE has experienced a problem and needs to shut down, tra la!” issue. Can’t say I miss it any.
Firefox does not talk to the MS mothership.
Oh, just thought of a downcheck–the MS upgrade site doesn’t get along with FF (quelle surprise!) so I guess there’s one reason why I still allow IE an occasional airing. Oh, and there’s no compatible Pix2Fone support for FF 2.0–but my current phone has USB support, so meh…
But ya just gotta love that tabbed browsing… 
Why i use Firefox:
Tabbed browsing - yes, i know IE7 has it now, but FF had it ages ago.
Mouse gestures - once you’ve tried them, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them.
Various other plugins
Because, although i’m not a web designer myself, i like the idea of supporting a standards-compliant browser, rather than one that deliberately and obtusely refuses to conform to standards just because it has the greatest market share.
I should say that, in my experience, Opera is just as good as Firefox, and better in some respects. Anyone thinking of switching from IE wold be well advised to give Opera a try also.
Hey as long as you are using Firefox I’ll give you a couple of tips. Go through the Tools>Options and change all the settings to the way you want. You can make it so that a new tab opens in the background if you middle click (the default is to take you directly to the like you just middle clicked), and there are others that you can fiddle with.
Every now and then you have to close and reopen Firefox because the cache does some magic that eats up your RAM, and closing Firefox gives you good juju as far as RAM is concerned.
Essential Extension:
Adblock
Adblock Filter Set G
Undo Close Tab For when you close something you shouldn’t
Blank Last Stops FF from hiding the tab bar when you close the last tab
New Tab Button on Tab Bar Kind of Useful
Scrapbook Allows you to save any website (to prevent the SOB’s from removing their site from the Internet) to your HD
SessionSaver When it all starts to fall apart, it really falls apart. This extension will restore your tabs exactly the way they were if FF crashes or if you close it accidentally (or to get the juju)
BugmeNot
Nuke Anything Enhanced Good for removing things that you don’t want/can’t make adblock to remove
ctrl tab goes from one tab to the next
ctrl shift tab goes from the next tab to the one tab
Both these features are available without extensions in Firefox 2.0.