Firefox 3

I've recommended the Firefox web browser (available for Mac and Windows) to a lot of people. After spending about a week using this latest, greatest version 3, I can tell you that it's an even easier recommendation to make. Why's that, you ask?

First, it's definitely more responsive, and tests show that it has a lower memory footprint. That means it uses less RAM for the same tasks, freeing up memory for your other (more, ahem, RAM-hogging) applications. As somebody who opens a lot of tabs, whatever improvements they made to keep the browser from slowing down with lots of tabs is most welcome.

Second, there are lots of little tweaks and additions geared towards making your web browsing life more enjoyable and productive. For example, the Bookmarks toolbar gives you a "Most Visited" option, the usefulness of which should be apparent. There's also a "recently bookmarked" feature that comes in handy. In fact, the whole Bookmarks area has been overhauled, so check it out.

The "Awesome Bar" is nice too. Here's how Firefox describes it:

"The Awesome Bar is the affectionate name for the new Firefox 3 Smart Location Bar. The new location bar learns as you use it, adapting to your preferences and making your browsing more personal. When you type in text, the auto-complete function displays possible matching sites from your browsing history, bookmarks, and tags. This makes it easy to scan the list and quickly identify the site you want to visit. Our beta testers started calling it the Awesome Bar and the name stuck!"

I also really like the "identity" notifier, which shows up to the left of your location bar. It's very helpful for identifying secure sites - much more so than the old-school, wee-little lock hidden down at the bottom of the screen almost like an afterthought on older versions. Anyways, you can hover over this area (shown below - the green area on the left) and get useful info about the site you're visiting.

I haven't even looked into the security improvements, but supposedly it's more impervious to malware than previous versions or other browsers.

On Windows, Firefox 3 will replace your version 2 - so if you're the sort with a lot of Firefox 2.0 plug-ins you just can't live without, check to see if your plug in providers have upgraded to support 3 yet. Otherwise, hold off. On the Mac, the new and old version can coexist provided you rename the old version to "Firefox 2."

The FF people were hoping for a million downloads on "opening day," knowing that a LOT of people were looking forward to this release. They far surpassed it. Eight million Web users can't be wrong, so give it a try yourself.