Firefox 3

The browser wars are still going strong.  The latest salvo in that war is Firefox 3, released yesterday.  Firefox has gained steadily on Internet Explorer for two primary reasons.  First, Firefox is more secure, mainly because it does not natively support ActiveX controls.  It is ActiveX that has made Internet Explorer such a security risk.

Second, Firefox just does a better job on things like tabbed browsing and it is extremely customizable through the use of plugins or add-ons.  Internet Explorer added plugin support in IE7 but it is limited and has never really caught on.  Firefox, on the other hand, has literally hundreds of available add-ons, making it a very good web 2.0 browser.

There are add-ons for social networking, for example, so you can more easily submit sites to your favorite social network.  There’s a blogging add-on called ScribeFire that allows you to blog directly from Firefox.  This makes it very easy to blog about something you run across online because it is right in front of you and you can copy and paste with ease (see Jenn’s Fair Use post for warnings about this).

Other excellent add-ons include Zoho Notebook Helper which gives you an online note taking tool.  IE Tab allows you to use the Internet Explorer engine to open pages in Firefox that require ActiveX controls to function properly.  Company intranet sites often need IE to work so this plugin allows you to use Firefox on those site.  Foxmarks is a tool for saving and synchronizing your bookmarks across different computers.  Tab Mix Plus gives you almost total control over tabs, how and where they open.  Zotero is an online research tool that makes it easy to save content along with the proper documentation for a bibliography or reference list.

The list of Firefox plugins seems almost limitless.  To find your own you simply click on the tools menu in Firefox and select Add-ons.  That will show you what add-ons you already have and the Get Add-ons button in the top left takes you to the Firefox add-on page.

All of these features existed in Firefox 2.  Firefox 3 adds significant security to the browsing experience.  It will, for example, warning you when you visit a dangerous or suspect site without having to use a third party add-on.  This includes phishing sites as well.  Also, Firefox 3 is very fast.  Firefox was always faster than IE but now it’s faster still, loading pages very quickly.

If you are a current Firefox user with your own slate of Add-ons you will discover that some of your add-ons need to be updated and some may not have updates just yet.  If you really depend on an add-on you should make sure there is a version of it that is compatible with Firefox 3 before you proceed.  If there isn’t, check the developer’s web site for information about when they might have an update.  All of the add-ons listed in this post have Firefox 3 compatible versions.

Since Firefox 3 was just released yesterday you may have some trouble downloading it.  The demand is really high right now and the site is loading slowly if at all.  But hang in there.  If it takes a few days for demand to slow, it’ll be worth the wait.