It’s already huge. Surfers downloaded 8.3 million copies of the new Firefox 3 on June 16, the day it was launched. But, that number does not answer one crucial question: how good is Firefox 3?
It is lighter than other browsers and makes browsing a lot more pleasant, particularly compared to Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 6, which is what one could call bloatware software that has been bloated with all sorts of useless stuff. The earlier versions of Firefox quickly became quite popular as a viable alternative to IE.
The nicest thing about Firefox 3 is that third-party vendors can develop all sorts of applications that feature as plug-ins into the browser. Of course, several of the plug-ins are quite silly, and tend to make Firefox fairly bloated too, but the logic is simple.
If you want your browser to be nice and light, you can have the plain vanilla Firefox, plus, maybe, one or two plug-ins such as the Google toolbar.
However, if you want more bells and whistles in your browser, you can do that as well. Some of the plug-ins are fairly useful. Toolbars work on all browsers, but Firefox has plug-ins that allow you to work your Web e-mail as an online drive, store online bookmarks, and, of course, there’s Greasemonkey, which allows people to make changes in the way they view pages. Firefox is, therefore, infinitely customizable.
For people who have light installations of Firefox 3, the changeover can be rather smooth. Others, particularly some people who are running Greasemonkey applications, have complained that the first version of Firefox 3 is a resource hog.
The other main change with Firefox 3 is the security enhancement. The problem is that most of these changes are not visible and they said the same thing about Microsoft Vista. But…