I've been playing with alphas and betas of Firefox 3.5 for a while, and it's been a joy seeing it turn from a crashy, slow memory hog with an awesomely fast Javascript engine to a less-crashy memory hog with an awesomely fast Javascript engine to a nicer and nicer browser. Anyway, the revisions are over, the browser is out of the gates, and it's wonderful. Why?
Extensions: these are cool, free plugins that:
- translate Japanese for me on the fly
- eliminate stupid quizzes from my stupid facebook news feed
- let me download music straight from Blip.fm (yarr!)
- let me customize any page on the WHOLE INTERNETS with custom css and javascript
- sync all my bookmarks across all my computers
The Awesome Bar: Instead of an address bar, you get an Awesome Bar, which reads your brain and brings up the place you wanted to go (kind of like Quicksilver, but for the whole web). It searches titles and URLS of pages in your history and bookmarks, looks at which pages you've visited frequently or recently, and uses that to predict your likely destinations. Or something. Point is, telepathy!
Ubiquity: This little plugin with the power to change everything.
Why Firefox and not Chrome or Safari or Opera? It's a pretty valid question. I haven't played with Opera much, but Safari and Chrome are blazing-quick, seem to eat less memory than Firefox, and look prettier on smaller screens. What sells me on Firefox, though, is the extensions. You may not have the same feature needs I do, but I guarantee that once you've browsed through the add-ons out there, there's going to be something that will change your internet world for the better.
