Firefox

You've probably heard all of the hubbub about Firefox during the last year or so, and guess what? It's all well-founded hubbub. So go get Firefox now. I'll wait. OK, good. Now you've got the best web browsing experience there is. The biggest advantages of Firefox are increased speed, tabbed browsing, web standards compliance, extensions, and themes.

Tabbed browsing allows you to have several websites open in one browser window, so you don't have to keep switching between browser copies to get back to another website.

Web standards compliance simply means that Firefox adheres to the W3C (the people that write the web standards) standards for rendering web pages. Not all browsers follow the standards (uh...Internet Explorer comes to mind), so web designers must work around their limitations. Since Firefox follows the rules, you see web pages the way the W3C meant them to be seen.

Extensions are small add-ons that add functionality to the browser. There are already so many extensions, it wouldn't make any sense to list them all here. In the near future, I'll be suggesting extensions that I regularly use -- in the meantime, go visit the Firefox extensions page to see everything that's available.

Themes allow you to change the look and feel of the browser to your liking. You can create your own, or go to the Firefox themes page to choose one of the many themes that have already been created by the Firefox community.