What I consider to be the best multi-platform internet browser is making news today. Mozilla is attempting to break the world record of most downloads in 24 hours with their release of Firefox 3 at 1 PM EST. Firefox has spoiled me thanks to it’s endless customizations and add-ons that I cannot live without and I’ll be downloading this web browser on all of my machines.
In comparison, I’ve found Internet Explorer 7 to be lousy on Vista. Microsoft seems to have a hard time making a decent web browser for their own platform, and I won’t be holding my breath for IE 8. Safari sucks on Vista as well, and I don’t appreciate Apple trying to bundle Safari with iTunes. As much as people say Apple is (Think) ‘Different’ from Microsoft they use many of the same tactics. Safari actually runs fine on Leopard, but the lack of customization is a huge deal breaker. Why use Safari when Firefox will automatically check my Gmail and Google Reader every 5 minutes so I don’t have to?
One major criticism of Firefox 2 was it’s speed and memory consumption. The benchmarks on the latest Firefox 3 release candidates have shown that Mozilla has taken care of these problems and is just as fast if not faster than the major competitors. If you’ve never used Firefox (is this your first day on the Internets?) or you decided that Firefox 2 wasn’t up to par, today is a good day to test drive Mozilla’s latest outing and decide if it’s time for a change.
EDIT: I forgot to mention one more little tidbit: Firefox 3 will come installed with a matching theme for your OS! So if you’re on a Windows machine, the Firefox default theme looks similar to IE, and on a Mac the default theme mimics Safari. Linux even has it’s own version. A nice little touch by the folks at Mozilla IMHO.
You can download Firefox 3 before it’s released! Go to http://digg.com/software/Download_Firefox_3_0_before_it_s_released