Firefox 3

I was one of the nearly 8 million that downloaded the Firefox 3 browser on June 17th. As of yesterday, Firefox 3 has been downloaded over 20 million times. The vast majority of these downloads are people that have Firefox 2, of course. But there are reports that a small part of these downloads represent people switching from Microsoft's IE browser to Firefox.

After living with Firefox 3 for a week, I can certainly recommend it. If you have Firefox 2 (or you are the couple people that routinely read this site using Firefox 1.5 or 1.0), the new Bookmarks with tagging and the new location bar (called the "Awesome Bar" which is just too cutsie) are worth the small amount of effort to download and install the update. It is much faster opening sites, even when you do like I do and open 20 or so tabs all at once. The lockups and memory leaks that clogged up your entire system are gone. Definitely worth it.

If you use IE, it is certainly worth a try. Now that IE has tabbed browsing, the main cosmetic reason for switching to Firefox seems to have been removed. But under the hood, Firefox 3 is much more secure, automatically blocking known malware sites and adding a bunch of warnings when you are about to do something stupid. I haven't used IE in years, so I can't give you any idea which is faster or uses less memory (is that really important when entry level machines have 2GB of RAM?). But the added security features alone make a strong case for at least giving Firefox 3 a spin around the block.

All this is in the context of running Windows XP. If you run Linux, I assume Firefox 3 is a step forward and maybe they figured out a way to correct some of the annoying behaviors, like grabbing and dragging buttons when you try to click on them. If you have Apple, from what I've heard, Safari is still king, but again, probably nothing lost if you give Firefox a workout.

Short version: Get it.