2008 has really been the Year of Firefox. When v1 was released on 2004, the New York Times published a full page ad for the browser and it has been Mozilla's crowning achievement ever since. The original Mozilla browser has been retired, but Mozilla has also started development on other browser projects, such as Camino and Seamonkey.

Year to Date reports for the major browsers show that Firefox is really gaining steam. IE shares have dropped 5%, while Safari and Firefox grew 14% each from their respective market shares.

Firefox 3 launched with the worldwide effort known as "Firefox Download Day", a 24-hour period aimed at setting the world record for most downloads at 8 million. Version 3.0 was released on June 17, 2008, followed by 3.0.1 a month later, 3.0.2 on September 23 and 3.0.3 on September 26. This is one of the fastest consecutive releases ever by Mozilla, noting Mozilla's responsvieness to security vulnerabilities.

Of course, all this has been covered, but I wanted to use this as a preface to my real intention: Why I use Firefox.

Add-ons

• DownThemAll!
• Facebook Toolbar
• Fire.fm
• Simple RSS Reader
• TinyUrl Creator
• TwitterFox

Firefox has become the web browser for knowlegable users who want security, ease of use and customization of their web experience. Other browsers have popped up to compete with Firefox, but they have to provide a unique experience to hold any ground. Flock is aimed at social networking, Chrome is aimed at simplicity and spying on what you do and others are flying under the radar without being seen.