Fire

The quicksand hasn't dried out yet, and new crasher bugs still blow through town occasionally in the nightly builds, so I can't in good conscience tell you to upgrade to Firefox 3 until it hits Release Candidate status. But believe me, you'll want to switch over as soon as it's safe.

Let me start with the low-hanging fruit:

• It's faster.
• It uses way less memory, especially on Windows.
• It's prettier, especially on Mac.
• It makes the web prettier. (Typographic ligatures and kerning! In a web browser! Holy shit! And color management, too, although you have to turn that one on manually.)

So yes, better in all the predictable ways, fine—the real meat is in the weirder stuff. There are all kinds of miscellaneous UI improvements, like the ability to move tabs from one window to another, the oversized back button (which I've decided I quite like), the post-facto password saver, the ability to easily disable plugins, and the increased exposure of the session-restore feature from FF2. But the standout among them all is the combo of the new bookmarks system and something known as... "The Awesomebar."

It sounds simple enough in summary (the location bar now searches your bookmarks and history), but I am using surprisingly little hyperbole when I say that the Awesomebar will change everything you know about web browsing. My ancient and hard-wired custom of filing a bookmark and then digging for it later is almost entirely gone—now I just "star" a page if I think I'll need it later, and when the time comes, I type a word or two into the Awesomebar and the sucker is there. And even if I forgot to star it, the Bar is smart enough to figure out which pages in the history are most important by combining the frequency and recency of your visits.

In fact, the Awesomebar eliminates the need for the entire "bookmarks" paradigm—everything is history, history lives in the location bar, and stars (bookmarks) are how you mark certain pieces of history as permanent and important (with optional tags for categorizing). It's a whole new approach to remembering things; not just a linear technical improvement, but a re-imagining of something fundamental in the way we use information.

And hey, if that doesn't turn your crank, at least it's faster, prettier, and uses less memory.

Also, if you've ever preferred to use a command line for a task, the Awesomebar has some special tricks for you. It's about the closest thing I've seen to a shell for the Web. --And I should mention that you can still use the bookmarks system in the traditional fashion -- your bookmarks menu and folders remain right there for when you need them. I haven't been needing them very often.

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