Firefox 3 - The Everyman Review

I'm going to come right out and say it, I am not an expert with internet browsers. If you want the technical side of Firefox you may need to look elsewhere. However, I think I can make a pretty good case for the average Firefox user.

Firefox 3 is pretty awesome. There I said it. A little history may be in order for you to see where I sit and stand; I really don't care for the whole 'open source rules all-commercial software be damned' / Micro$oft sucks, etc and etc. I just want things that are practical and work. I think you need to give a round of aplause to both camps as the open-source movement has made everyday computing so much more inexpensive and innovatice, and the commercial side (and I'm mainly talking about Microsoft for this example) has brought computing to the masses via Windows. Yeah, yeah I keep hearing that if they didn't so then someone else would have, but you know what? They won. To the winners go the spoils, so to speak. They are not a glowing example of perfection, but they churn out some pretty good software for what it is--software that can work with A LOT OF DIFFERENT of hardware. I try not to maintain a bias for the sake of maintaining an allegiance but this fued of elites wears me down.

That said, I have used Internet Explorer from version 5 up to 7 and Firefox from 1.5 up to 3 now. Both browsers have improved immensly over the years. And up to 6 month ago, I almost used Firefox exclusively. Why did I stop? Because Firefox 2 seemed to grab memory and never let it go. I may be technically wrong on this, but the longer I had it open, the slower my computer seemed to get. And after long periods of time, it seemed to be less stable. Going back to Internet Explorer 7 worked well for me and up to a couple of days ago, was used pretty exclusively.

I installed Firefox 3 the day it came out, and I'm pretty impressed. It's fast and doesn't seem to hang on to RAM as much as it's predacessor. It's pretty and pretty simple looking. Plus you get all the advantages of the thousands of plug-ins made by the community. The only gripe I have is that my password management software doesn't work well with it as it does with Internet Explorer, but I don't believe that's Firefox's fault. In my case, it may be a little pain because I've grown fond of not haveing to enter in my user name and password on every site, but for most people this is a non issue.

All that said, I highly recommend Firefox 3. It will receive a spot on my list of open-source/free software as I believe it's earned it. Now we can sit back and see what Microsoft has in store for us with Internet Explorer 8 which is due out soon. It the war over free software, the consumer is the winner.

Final Verdict 4.5 out of 5 stars