[Truth Table]

...you need just to get alternative browsers off the ground?. That's the point. You don't need extensions to run FF. They are optional. Your question may be slightly reworded: How much of the features of IE do you actually use do justify it's C bloat? A plug in is really small (no more than a few hundred K at most), and you get to pick which ones you want loaded. FF gives you the options. Right out of the download, it rips IE apart as far as speed and page rendering--That is something that just cannot be denied. It's fast, and it's tight. As an aside, look at open source for the broswer. Bugs are fixed. Fixed now. And the fixes work. Why? ...For the exact same reason the Blogosphere was able to take down CBS.

[js1138]

...it rips IE apart as far as speed and page rendering--That is something that just cannot be denied.

I would have kept using FF if I had noticed that. My mileage differed. I will say tht it seemed faster at first, but after a week or so I couldn't tell the difference.

My browsing is probably different from most. Other than FR I mostly go to commercial sites looking for instruction manuals, drivers, catalogs, stuff like that. I avoid sites that put up flash videos on the home page. I just don't go back. If I want to buy something, I generally head for the site that has the simplest, cleanest and fastest interface. That's pretty independent of browser.

[BigSkyFreeper]

Right out of the download, it rips IE apart as far as speed and page rendering

Actually YMMV. For me, IE opens and renders pages faster than FF. IE on my machine renders pages faster from the cache as well as freshly downloaded pages and graphics, including interlaced GIF images.