Today Mozilla finally released Firefox 3.5.  While beta versions have been around for quite a few months, I haven’t tried any of those myself, however, I did just install the final release.

Firefox 3.5 on an eeePC Screenshot

Everything seems to feel more responsive, and even most of the addons I had did work fine. Only the theme needed to be replaced because it was not compatible.

Firefox is an internet browser, and is similar in functionality as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari. The main advantage of Firefox for me is that it provides a “safe” browsing experience. While unintentional, with doing research on the internet you do get exposed to various malicious websites. Websites infected with some form of virus, or popups of fake virus scanners that ask you to click here to fix your PC. With browsers such as Internet Explorer, these issues are quite hard to get rid of, mainly because Internet Explorer is rooted deep into Windows itself, and if it crashes for some reason, it usually takes something else you have running with it. While the newer versions are safer, they still account for most of the virus/spyware related issues on computers today. Safari, Apple’s web browser, is similarly rooted into Apple’s Mac OS operating system, and while more resilient towards these issues, it has its quirks as well. With Firefox, which works as a separate application, the bad stuff has less of a chance to do serious harm.

I personally have used Firefox back when it first came out. Originally part of Netscape, later made into Phoenix, Firebird and then Firefox, I’ve grown accustomed to how it works, and what it is capable of. From its early days, it offered tabbed browsing, and while now commonly found in all similar programs, it was groundbreaking. I use a “bookmark folder”,Daily, which contains bookmarks to about 10 sites I check a couple of times a day. All I have to do is rightclick on the folder, and click on “Open all in tabs”, and it will take me to the first listed page, and opens the rest to load in the background. Rather than having to wait for each page to load, I can quickly skim through the sites for news items. In addition, when doing searches, things get even easier. While skimming through search results from a site like Google, I just control-click (hold down the ctrl-key and click) on a link to open it in a tab, enabling it to load in the background, while I continue skimming through the results. When I have a few sites selected, I click on the tabs to view the information on the selected website.

All in all, I highly recommend Firefox for any internet user.