Firefox 3 has been released (available for download here)! Why should you bother downloading it? I’ll tell you a few good reasons why I downloaded it, plain and simple.

Up until recently I’d been using Camino, a slick-looking browser which works pretty similar to Firefox 2. Actually, it works a little bit better - in the way that it looks nice and puts favicons next to my bookmarks (yes, that IS a big deal). I occasionally had to use Firefox v.2 for development stuff (using Firebug), but wouldn’t use it as my default browser, as it is ugly as hell.

Then came Firefox 3 beta. It was fairly similar to version 2 if you’ve been using that, except it looks different, and had a whole host of unique and fixed features (below). So Camino went in the bin, Firefox 2 got put aside, and Firefox 3 got set to primary browser - and here’s why…

1. The interface looks good, and is easy to understand. It looks like a cross between Safari and Camino, but with better designed elements (like the back and forward buttons)
2. Bookmarks have little FavIcons next to them, which is important for me to navigate through my millions of saved sites and blogs
3. The address bar is ‘intuitive’ - which means that it lists previously visited sites, in order of visit, and will list them based on keywords (e.g. if I type ‘news’ it’ll bring up all the sites containing that title, content or meta!)
4. It crashes far less and can support more than two tabs being open at once (which Firefox 2 had problems with!)
   
5. It’s fixed some Javascript badness! This is one of the biggest things for me (from a designer point of view) - sometimes in Firefox 2, on pages with dynamic javascript animation - text would do odd rasterisation things on mouseover. Well now that’s fixed.

There are a whole host of reasons to compliment those - but that pretty much sums it up from a typical end-user point of view. Still, there are a few bad things, like no Firebug (Update: You can download Firebug here), and that it’s slightly slower than Safari - but on the whole, it’s definitly worth downloading and trying out for yourself. I guarantee you won’t go back! Download

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