Firefox 3

What we liked:
Firefox has a wonderfully tidy interface. It’s not especially attractive, you could even say it’s slightly dated, but it’s clean and easy to use, with all features accessible through straightforward menus. Typing words into the address bar (or the Awesome Bar, as Mozilla calls it) brings up a list of possible sites from your history and bookmarks, with the results refined as you type. Clicking the star icon in the address bar remembers the site you’re on (starred sites can be accessed through the Smart Bookmarks folder), while clicking twice will bookmark it. Support for tags makes organising and finding your favourite sites easy.

RSS feeds are handled either through the built-in Live Bookmarks feature or by using a web service such as Google Reader, depending on your preference. Firefox provides phishing and malware protection, an advanced download manager that lets you pause/resume file transfers and search through downloads, and enhanced zoom which scales layout, text and images. As well as offering crash protection,Firefox also lets you save your session when you quit, so you can later resume where you left off.

Firefox’s trump card comes via the incredible amount of add-ons available for the program. Adblock Plus, Greasemonkey, IE Tab and thousands of others give you the power to transform Firefox into a browser perfectly suited to your personal requirements. Finding and installing new extensions is all handled directly, and seamlessly, through the Add-ons Manager.

How it can be improved:
Firefox is currently missing features found in other browsers, such as Chrome’s Incognito mode and IE8’s Web Slices, and it’s falling behind when it comes to speed. The next major release – 3.5 – will address some of these issues, but there are already add-ons available that mimic other omissions. Isolating tabs to prevent one from crashing the others – a feature available in Chrome – heads our current wish list of future add-ons.

Our verdict:
Anyone who has used Firefox won’t be surprised to see the program come top in our round-up. It’s packed with useful features and the vast repository of add-ons means it’s easily tailored to suit your needs.

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