With the introduction of both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 recently, one thing is certainly clear - the browser market is finally starting to become interesting again, after years of being stagnant. It really was Mozilla's Firefox browser that shook the sleeping Microsoft behemoth into realizing that it wasn't adequate to simply sit at IE6.

Of the notable things that Firefox has been doing better than IE for awhile now, one of the most important has been browser extensibility, or add-ons as they're now known on both browsers. For Firefox, we've had the Firefox Add-Ons site for some time now. It keeps an index of recently submitted add-ons (previously known as extensions). Previously there wasn't an analog in the IE world, in terms of an officially sponsored IE Add-On site.

Now there is; Microsoft now maintains Add-Ons for Microsoft Internet Explorer, the equivalent of Firefox Add-Ons but for IE. Although currently extremely short on content (actual add-ons), the site is organized nicely and is easy to get around. One frustration for me is that IE add-ons are distributed as executable files, and are actually added to my Add / Remove Programs listing. I'd much prefer for IE add-ons to be distributed in a custom format, and managed from within the browser, as Firefox does with its XPI distribution format.