The real reason why Firefox is an improvement over IE is the fact that Firefox fully supports W3C standards. You have to understand that MS chose to win the browser war over Netscape by providing their customers (IE users) a better feature base: more tricks, tools and proprietary code that developers could take advantage of. Sure, Netscape had the <blink> tag, but IE featured these wonderful little things called ActiveX controls (sarcasm intentional) that developers could use to do all sorts of cool things, standards be damned.

The addition of feature sets within the progression of IE has been wonderful for the end user: the person just wanting to surf the web. However, for developers, it has made life a living nightmare. Before the wide emergence of standards-based browsers (when Mozilla bought out Netscape's browser), we only had to worry about supporting IE. At that time, very few of us really understood what the W3C was talking about regarding web standards, since (nearly) everything they proposed would break IE.

Take a look at the evolution of the web since the time Mozilla emerged. Standards have come out of the closet to become a driving force on the internet. True separation of structure and presentation is now within grasp, something that was nearly impossible with IE 4, 5, and 5.5. Sure, IE still has approximately 90% of the browser market, but it's dropping every day. As it drops, MS is realizing that developers actually care about web standards. This can only be a good thing.

So why is Firefox important? Because Firefox is the browser that will change the way that we, as developers, look at the web. No longer do we have to code for IE first, and worry about the 0.5% of users out there that are using a secondary browser. We can now code for standards-compliance first, then go back and hack our code for IE.

The more people that make the switch to a standards-compliant browser the faster we can move towards a web that is useable and accessible.

Sorry for the long-winded diatribe. I'll get off my soapbox now.