Firefox 3

The long awaited release of Firefox 3 has finally left Beta and is ready for you to download. I’ve been using the new browser for a couple of days now and am very happy with the overall performance. Anyone who has used Firefox for any length of time knows that it could be a memory hog. There were several memory leaks and FF2 was generally un-optimized for efficient memory usage which has been resolved in this release.

The first thing I noticed was the modified look and feel. While I like it and it continues to grow on me my first reaction was that it reminded me a little more of Internet Explorer than I had expected but I believe that is due to the fact that I am running on Windows Vista right now and FF3 adapts to your native look and feel. I also lost several plug-ins which are not compatible with FF3 though nothing that would prevent me from making the upgrade.  One of my favorite plug-ins, GMarks, which synchronizes your Google Bookmarks with Firefox (as  you have your Google Book marks tagged, very useful!) still works flawlessly.

The inclusion of page title and favicons in the url drop-down or during url entry is nice as are the small but noticeable improvements to the download manager and one click bookmarking if you use the browser bookmarks as opposed to something like Google bookmarks. There are really too many changes in productivity, security, memory and customization and improvements to mention but overall the new and improved Firefox is definitely an upgrade from FF2 and continues to provide a far superior browsing experience to Internet Explorer.

If you haven’t made the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox, now would be a gret time to do it. You won’t be sorry and will be impressed at how much more you can do with it.