I neglected to mention that the folks at the Mozilla foundation released version 1.5 of Firefox earlier this week. Some of the improvements include a faster rendering engine (pages load faster), enhanced pop-up blocking and a new Clear Private Data tool.

Of course, if you're already using Firefox and have any extensions installed (which you should, by the way, on both counts), some have not been updated for this latest version yet. One extension which I had used before was miniT, which allowed me to reorder Firefox's tabs by dragging and dropping them. Since this functionality is included in Firefox now, the extension isn't necessary. For all but one of the remaining non-updated extensions, there's a workaround to allow them to work with this version. That left only one extension that I have installed in earlier versions of Firefox that doesn't work now, and I don't think I ever used it.

Now remember, I earn my living by building applications for Microsoft Windows using Microsoft tools and languages. I have the beta of Internet Explorer 7 installed on my computer for when I have to have IE for a particular web site, but my default browser is Firefox. If you browse the Internet from a Windows computer, you should be using Firefox as your default browser.

There are a few bumps when changing over to Firefox from IE which I need to tell you about. One thing that you could find annoying is your IE Favorites (called Bookmarks in Firefox). Of course, you can import your IE Favorites into Firefox, but if you have rearranged them into a particular order, you lose the effort you put into that, since they all end up in alphabetical order. This problem is compounded by the fact that Firefox requires an additional step beyond IE's approach of just dragging your links around in the Favorites menu. But it's a one-time shot, and once you've imported them and gotten them back in your desired order, you're done.

Anyway, go get Firefox, install it and use it for a while. Once you get used to it, you'll be glad you did.

Update: As Kevin reminds me in the comments, the problem with dragging and dropping Bookmarks is limited to moving Bookmark folders, not Bookmarks themselves. At any rate, the folders can easily be arranged using the Manage Bookmarks... functionality on the Bookmarks menu, and again, it's a one-time shot and you're done with it.

Another problem I just discovered was that upgrading to 1.5 broke the SpellBound extension I use to spell check text I write in Firefox. Reinstallation of the extension and associated libraries (found here) solved the problem.