by Wyatt Walter

Created on: August 13, 2009

Firefox is considered by many as the best browser on the market and the post child of open source. It has massive popularity with a great community, boasting over two million downloads within just the first few hours of the release of its latest version, 3.5. But what makes this product so great? Well, let's take a look.

Massive Add-ons Library

This is easily the biggest thing drawing me to Firefox. There are add-ons for practically everything that you could think of doing while browsing the web and then a little more. Are you a web developer or do you support web applications? Firebug is a tool that I wouldn't go without. Hate seeing ads? Install the AdBlock extension. Want to skip a song in your media player without leaving your favorite blog? Use FoxyTunes. The list goes on and on. You can even browse your Amazon EC2 or S3 accounts from within Firefox if you work with cloud computing. Sure, other browsers support add-ons and have many to choose from themselves, but none can match the amount of add-ons or community surrounding those add-ons. Sometimes these add-ons add very little to the experience, but often those little things can add up in a really big way.

"Awesome Bar"

This may sound a bit odd, but the address bar (named "Awesome Bar" by Mozilla, the makers of Firefox) is a life-saver. When you start typing into the address bar, Firefox will search not only search for recently visited web site addresses, but it also searches the titles of pages you have visited in your history. This may sound fairly simplistic, but extremely helpful you just can't quite remember the name of that site you read about a certain topic. When one develops a memory like mine, this is a great time-saver.

Security

While browsing the Internet, security needs to be a top priority. One hands out private information more than they may realize and having that information get into the wrong hands is not something that anyone wants. While security is a difficult thing to gauge, Firefox seems to model the open source way of dealing with security issues in almost a utopian way. For those unfamiliar with the idea of open source, the source code for Firefox is available for anyone to download, look at, and modify to their liking for free. In theory, it allows millions of eyes to be watching the code for security vulnerabilities and also looking for ways to fix them faster. Firefox seems to prove that this theory can work given a good community. According to Mozilla, in 2006 there was an average of 9 days between the discovery of a vulnerability and a patch release versus an average of 284 days for Internet Explorer. Obviously, since the vulnerability is out there for everyone to see it must be fixed faster, but it does seem to show the world that the model does work.

Runs On Everything

This may not mean anything to someone who uses only Windows or only Mac OS X, but for those like me who run both Mac OS X and Linux, this is a big deal. Firefox gives me the native feel of the operating system it is running in, but add-ons work the same way and I can run those same add-ons using any platform I want.

Performance

Firefox offers all these features without sacrificing performance. In fact, it's one of the fastest around. Of course, with each release the different browsers seem to leapfrog each other, but Firefox is always in the hunt as one of the fastest.

Firefox is a great browser and I have barely been able to scratch the surface. If you have not used it, be sure to download and try it out!

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