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).

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