Firefox 3 is officially released! All rejoice! No… seriously, you should rejoice. They took something great, and made it great-er!

I’ve been a big fan of firefox for a long while. I run it on any platform I use… be Linux, XP, Vista. It runs better, was ahead of the curve on tabs, and has an amazing community full of add-ons that makes Firefox whatever you need it to be. Hyperwords, Web Developer, Firebug, etc etc etc. I could go on, but I digress.

Firefox 3 says it runs faster, safer, and smarter… of which so far, I can say that is true. While running the ‘old’ firefox, you still beat the shit out of IE7. IE7 is like a Soccer mom van… and Firefox is your sports car. Well… get ready for your Indy 500 car in the form of Firefox 3.

FASTER: Gmail runs amazing… like, super amazing. Figures from Mozilla put it over 6 times faster than IE7. Major upgrades to Javascript speeds and support, memory leaks patched up, faster method for rendering web pages, and… get this… smaller memory footprint. WHA? But it’s 3.0, doesn’t that mean it should take up more of your precious RAM? Nope… sorry kiddies, Mozilla actualy knows how to develop software.

SAFER: Built in Malware and virus detection. Anti-phishing alerts you of fraud sites. Instant site ID shows website information, especially for secure sites like banks and paypal. You know what IE gives you? Jack, thats what. The big Microsoft got lazy, and stopped being innovative.

SMARTER: Add-ons Manager lets you install add-ons easier than ever, the smart location bar is awesome, you can reopen closed tabs (yay!), and a much improved interface. One-click bookmark (star to the right of the location bar), the skin looks great, the RSS feed manager is nice.

Now, thats not to say I am thrilled about every change made with the new release… but thats just because there are features I probably wont use. The new zoom feature, for example. Am I thrilled? No, not really… does it make Mozilla any less AWESOME for me? Nope… still the same awesome.

I give Mozilla Firefox 3 a 10/10. If a browser can get better, it will be a surprise to me!