Your new Internet browser is ready — several of them, actually.
They’re all free, so take your pick.
The Mozilla Foundation, whose Firefox browser has already snared over 18 percent of the world’s Web surfers, has just introduced its latest upgrade, Firefox 3. For a nonprofit outfit, Mozilla can really sling the hype. The foundation practically dared us to visit getfirefox.com on Tuesday and download the new browser, in an effort to set a world record for the most file downloads in a single day. Suckers that we are, at least 7 million of us fell for it.
And what did we get in return? A darn good browser.
Firefox caught fire in 2004, when Microsoft Corp. hadn’t upgraded its Internet Explorer browser in three years. IE 6, as techies called it, was so famously buggy that the federal government’s data security experts began urging people not to use it. Suddenly, Firefox looked especially attractive — free, feature-rich, and far more secure than Explorer. Within a year, users had downloaded 100 million copies. By including a search window linked to the popular Google search engine, the Mozilla Foundation began raking in millions in advertising revenue. Microsoft’s near-monopoly on browsers was gone.
Still, Firefox wasn’t perfect. In 2007, security software maker Symantec found twice as many security bugs in Firefox as Microsoft’s newest browser, IE 7. Firefox 3 aims to squash the bugs and to deliver a bunch of new features.
Best of the lot is a new address bar that begins searching for Web sites even as you type. Start typing an address you frequently visit and Firefox 3 will display links to pages from that site that you viewed in the past.
Firefox 3 has also buffed up its file download system. New files are automatically scanned for viruses, and you can see the Internet domain…