I’ve tried to spread the word about Firefox to almost any person that has asked me for some sort of technical assistance over the past couple years. Prone to security holes and attacks its safe to say that Internet Explorer sucks plain and simple and if you’re still using that pile I urge you to download Firefox today.

If you have been using Firefox 2 you’ll be proud to know that version 3 of the software claims to have 15,000 improvements and is a huge improvement over its predecessor. While that may not mean a whole lot to you here are just a few things that Firefox 3 improves on:

Memory and Performance Improvements:
Regardless of all the other changes in Firefox this one is arguably the most welcome and needed. On default settings Firefox 3 consumes less memory then Opera and Safari (I won’t even mention IE because it’s not close) where as Firefox 2 was a hog on memory resources. Thanks to Gecko 1.9 Firefox 3 now renders pages faster even if they’re not fully downloaded. Following the trend set by Safari, Firefox 3 now uses profiling extreme increases in JavaScript performance.

Security
Powered by a superb auto-update system and a solid code base Firefox 3 does come with improved security. Most interesting is actually Larry. Who? Well, unofficially called Larry, he resides in the location bar. The favicon has been promoted to be clickable and once you do the click it shows Larry. Larry tells you how secure the web site is. On normal sites it’s simple non distinguishable from a normal favicon, but if it’s secure Larry turns blue. If it’s even better identify able, using EV, Larry turns green and shows the identity of the site. This way of showing security makes it easier for you to know your security level. Fraud protection, by Google, is now turned on by default. It will protect you from phishing as well as malware. And also much requested, Firefox 3 uses your local virus scanner to immediately scan downloaded files.

Add-ons
No, Firefox 3 doesn’t come with new add-ons bundles, you’ll need to download anything you want from Mozilla’s Firefox Add-ons site. But there have been made major efforts in this area. First of all when you upgrade it’s possible that not all your add-ons will work, Firefox 3 will check this for you on a first start after the upgrade, download them and restart. Those who don’t have the proper updates available should be disabled and are checked on intervals for compatible add-ons. Of course with the wide amount of add-ons this might happen to some users, most popular add-ons have been made ready for Firefox 3 though as the betas and release candidates were out for several months already. Restarting Firefox for add-ons have been a pain, and it will remain necessary, but the pain is softened by the ability to properly restore your session on restart. As a final usability improvement, you can also search and download add-ons through the add-ons screen itself.

Verdict
Firefox 3 is awesome and victory is near. Mozilla did a daring step, and it took some time, but in all areas Firefox 3 has been improved. Even Apple is inspired as Snow Leopard will also focus on memory and performance improvements. The amount of usability improvements is also staggering, bookmarking has never been this easy and powerful at the same time. Security is still top notch, with the auto-update, and has been improved by supporting EV, virus scanners and lending the help of partners such as Google. With add-ons still as a key player in Firefox 3 strategy, and no challenger in this area, Mozilla will have nothing to fear of the competition. The word of Firefox is already out on the street by its predecessors, and the competition, such as Opera and Internet Explorer won’t make a dent, as frankly they haven’t changed this much to be compelling. Safari and Camino should be careful, with Firefox 3’s improved platform integration.

Firefox 3 will be succeeded by Firefox 3.1 at the end of the year, which will add some features that just didn’t make it in time, before taking a jump to Firefox 4.

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