Looking to become a first time mozilla user

[Walkiry]

Firefox also APPEARS to consume more resources (my hard drive accesses almost constantly while it's running), but I've been told that it doesn't "hide" its resource usage like IE, but that sounds like propoganda, if you ask me.

Yes and no. IE loads itself up when you start up Windows, so it appears to work fast and snappy when you start it for the first time and doesn't look like it takes much more resources itself when you start it (because it was already loaded). In a sense it is "hiding" part of what resources it uses, but by the time you have three windows/tabs or so loaded with full graphics galore the difference is probably insignificant.

I use Firefox and I'm very happy with it. It's very stable, works as intended, and tabbed browsing is very useful. That added to the plethora of plugins you can find for it to do several things like blocking images and ad scripts based on regular expressions (*very* useful and powerful), the built-in popup blocker and the much better cookie management makes it a sure winner. You will notice the difference even if you don't know it enough, makes surfing a much more pleasant experience.

Vanilla Mozilla is a lot bigger and more bloated, but then again, it's intended to include everything and the kitchen sink if you want (a bit like the difference between the NEtscape navigator and the Communicator, with the whole E-mail/Usenet/whatever clients all rolled in one).