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I'd like to try firefox but I don't want two browsers as I like a "lean" computer... I also want to keep my active desktop.

I know that you have probably already received a reply to this, but having two, three, or even ten browsers on your computer isn't really going to effect how it runs at all.

Firefox is about 15MB (installed), IE is probably a little more than that, but in the same ballpark.

I'm not sure about you, but my computer has 700GB (real GB, not in powers of ten) of hard drive space. That is 734 million MBs. A more realistic number is probably 40GB, but we are still talking about tens of millions of megabytes of storage space. The space taken up by Firefox or IE is negligible.

That is really all the browser is costing you. It doesn't use up system resources while it isn't running.

I have had to help friends on several occasions fix their computers because they tried to "clean them up" and ended up deleting important system files. However they keep doing so because they are of a similar mindset, that somehow these programs are cluttering up their computer and adversely effecting its performance. But the truth is it isn't that big of a deal.

It is important to computer performance to have adulate free hard drive space on your computer, and to have your hard drive defragmented so that files are laid out in an efficient manor when your computer needs to access them. Neither of these things should require that you skimp on having useful applications installed on your machine.

I would say that there is nothing to lose in your trying out Firefox. You can keep your active desktop and use Firefox (if you want) for most of your browsing, and IE when you need or want to, and there is no problem with that at all.

Applications are simply tools, and some are better suited for different tasks than others. I personally have several hundreds of them installed that I have picked up (and in many cases written) to perform various tasks over the years. There are some that I don't need very often, but when I do it is nice to have them. As long as you obtain them legally and don't have them running all the time there is no downside to having more any more than there is a downside to having a bunch of word documents sitting on your computer.

-paridel