With Vista's compatibility headaches still fresh for a lot of our clients and a new Firefox release expected any day now, we keep getting asked which browser to standardise on for the office. Short answer: it depends what you're testing, but we still install Firefox 2 on every new machine we set up, alongside whatever came in the box.

Here is the longer answer we have been giving people.

It is free and it keeps itself up to date. Most of our clients are offices of three to ten people with nobody in charge of IT. Firefox checks for security updates on its own and asks once before installing them. That alone is worth a lot.

Tabs and the pop-up blocker. Internet Explorer 7 finally has both, but plenty of our clients are still on Windows XP machines with IE6, and we would rather not push a big upgrade on a machine that is otherwise working.

It behaves the same on the Mac. Two of our clients have a mix of Macs and PCs in the office. Using the same browser on both cuts down on the "it looks different on my computer" phone calls.

Add-ons. For us the Web Developer toolbar and Firebug are the reason we live in Firefox all day. Most clients won't need them, but a good ad blocker and a spell checker in web forms are popular.

We don't tell anyone to remove Internet Explorer. Online banking, the VAT returns site and a few older intranets still expect it, so we leave it on the desktop for those.

As for the new version: Firefox 3 has been in release candidate testing since May and it looks noticeably faster with less memory use. We will wait for the final release and probably the first point update before rolling it out on client machines. If you would like us to set it up for your office, give Tom a call.