Firefox 0.9

I'm sure this isn't news to some people but last week FireFox 0.9 was released. They have did some major rearrangement of the Theme manager and Extensions manager. Ok maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself. FireFox is a browser that is based on Mozilla with the objective to create a lighter and faster version Mozilla while keeping all the browsing features. It was originally called Phoenix, then change its name to Firebird until its renamed again as FireFox (hopefully for the final time) Anyway gone are IRC chat client(Chatzilla) and mail client. Mind you mail client now lives as a very versatile stand alone app called Thunderbird. Well that's another post I'm sure. Anyway the new Firefox has a slightly noticeable performance increase( I have been happy with the speed and stability since 0.7)over the last version. I had a chance to use it both at home and at work for the last few days. This product is showing serious signs of macerate. If your an IE users (or a Netscape/Mozilla for that matter) and are wondering what everyone is talking about give it a whirl. Its only a 4 mb download. IE users will notice right off the bat the lack of popups. Mozilla/Firefox has one of the best butane popup blocker out there. You need popups to make a certain site work doing a site by site by site exclusion. You can just double click the icon in bottom left hand corner and select the site and hit unblock. That easy. Don't get me started on tabbed browsing, one o f the most powerful browsing feature out there. My suggestion is to get in the habit of using them. They will decompiling your browsing forever. Themeing (read: skinning) gives you flexibility that IE can not do without a third part app. They also centralized and improved the website that has all new themes on it. I generally been using FireFox without any extents. This is the first version I ventured to using some. I have to admit, I'm not too sure why I haven't been using the GoogleBar before. Now I need it on all computers I do research on. Its too useful. I could go on for hours about this ( especially about tabbed browsing) I promise you if you give it chance, and get used to the small nuances of the Mozilla style browsers, you will mumble in disgust when you have to use IE on someone else's computer. Give it a try, you wont' regret it. But that's just my humble opinion. Its available for the window's, Linux and Mac OS X at Mozilla.org

Matt

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Edit:
I have found the coolest feature on the googlebar. Mind you I have never really used the Google Bar in IE so this might be old news to some. If you right click on the googlebar then go to "page info" you find something interesting, a Translate to English" option. Once you click on it will make an icon availble that will facilatate your translating needs. Have found a chance to use it but I'm sure I'll come accross one. See the picture below for more details.