The new Firefox is THA BOMB!

I started using Linux back in 2002. In those days, a good web browser for my O/S of choice was tough to come by. Linux browers were in a sort of "wilderness" phase. We had Mozilla (the open source version of Netscape), which had just reached version 1.0. But it was HUGE, slowed my system to a crawl, and rendered some web pages poorly. There were no plugins for flash or video, and overall the experience was crappy compared to IE on Windows or Mac. There were a couple of alternative browsers around like Opera and Konqueror, but the experience was similar.

But something happened a few months after that Mozilla milestone release. It spawned an experimental fork, codenamed Phoenix. The goal was to create a fast, lightweight but extensible, cross-platform browser that would render pages at least as well as IE. Six years, three name changes, and three milestone releases later, Firefox 3.0 has achieved that goal. And in a world where Windows is on 98% of ALL PC's and IE comes preinstalled on each and every one of them, Firefox has clawed it's way to a 20% browser market share!

A few of my favorite features:

  • It's so lightweight! It uses so little memory every with tabs open that my laptop barely registers a performance hit! 200% better than version 2.0!
  • Opens tabs from your previous session.
  • New bookmark system let's you tag bookmarks, so you can type something like "email" and it will display all bookmarks tagged as email so you don't have to go rifling around for it!
  • New address bar is SMART! Based on your browsing history you can type in the name of a site you've visited and it will just take you there!
  • Undo close tab!!!!!
  • Crazy new anti-phishing feature. It can be a bit aggressive, though.
  • New cool download manager.
  • Still as customizable as ever!
Get it, and let me know what you think!

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