Web Browser. The most important computer application today is the web browser.

I gotta hand it to Microsoft; they knew this years ago when they crushed Netscape. They knew something that many did not suspect: that the humble web browser would become the most important application on the home computer, perhaps even more important than the operating system itself. Well, the browser wars continue, but Microsoft’s IE can come nowhere close to my choice for web browser: Firefox.

No only does Firefox have dozens of useful extensions — everything from video downloaders, to performance enhancers, to ad blockers, to email checkers, to bookmark posters — it was the first to implement tabs, a must-have feature that IE still doesn’t have! With the Firefox 2.0 beta, a spell checker has been added, so this blog post I’m writing now should be relatively free of spelling errors. This is the one feature I missed from Safari when I moved to Firefox full-time.

Why did I move from Safari. Simply: it was slow; it got bogged down with a bunch of tabs open (too much spinning beach ball of death); and it just didn’t work with too many sites I used all the time, like Gmail (the chat feature) and Google Calendars. Sorry, Apple. firefox is better.

If you are a Windows user and you’re still using IE, the best thing you can do for yourself (short of switching to a Mac) is installing Firefox.