Oh CW, it sounds a bit like you feel a touch neglected. On behalf of all your devotees, we're glad you're up and about again.

Everyone seems to be joining in the Firefox publicity frenzy which has been ably and cleverly generated by young Asa Dotzler. (Mozilla: "Asa is our community quality advocate extraordinaire. He joined mozilla.org to turbo-charge our quality programs and to further develop our volunteer QA and testing community"). It shows the power of the forum communities and also the power of hype. Firefox may well be a better browser than IE. However to listen to its many advocates you would think there were only two browsers in the market. People seem to jump on publicity bandwagons without taking the time to fairly assess the options for themselves. Why do some public experts automatically advocate Firefox as the IE alternative? It may be better than IE in terms of security, but there are rendering problems and most of its features can only be availed through downloading and installing plug-ins which add features other browsers pioneered and come packaged with. As a product, it has been very successful, but as a browser, there are better alternatives such as Opera - faster smaller and complete with a plethora of features such as trash, true tabs, download manager, email, torrent support, customizable etc. straight out of the box. Although it can be configured to look nice and function well with the right plug-ins, I put Firefox on par with Maxthon etc. as second rank browsers, and IE very close behind in the third rank, (with the also-rans).
I used to use Firefox and Opera but now I only use Opera and sometimes IE.

Opera's a great browser. No doubt about that. But Firefox is free. Opera costs $US19.95.

True; the free version of Opera comes with those little ads which can be a pain in the **** to some people.