Building a Better Browser: Firefox Keeps Innovating

But Firefox 3 prunes away one of the best anti-phishing features of earlier versions. Where they painted the address box gold at a site that protected your login with encryption-- a measure almost always absent at scam sites -- Firefox 3 adds a less obvious blue highlight to the left end of that box, which offers some useful details on the site if you think to click on it. Sites offering an extra layer of authentication get a larger, green highlight, but amazingly few (for example, Buy.com but not Amazon.com) have gone to that trouble yet.

Other visual tweaks to Firefox 3 show a welcome willingness to learn from other browsers. Its back button is bigger than its forward button, a sensible recognition of which function sees more use (and a smart borrowing from Microsoft's long-dead MSN Explorer). You can also resize all of a page's contents -- text and images -- with quick keyboard shortcuts (a smart borrowing from Opera and Internet Explorer 7).

Although Firefox 3's Mac version looks much more like a standard Mac program than Firefox 2 did, it doesn't always work like one. For example, it can't display a PDF file hosted on a Web site without, at best, some tinkering. The latest version of Safari remains a better pick for Mac users.

The wide assortment of free plug-ins available for Firefox 3 theoretically gives it an infinite feature set, but it's most fairly judged as it exists right after being installed.

From that perspective, whoever's working on Firefox 4 has work left to do. Firefox 3 lacks Safari's "private browsing," which lets you borrow somebody else's copy without disturbing his or her settings and then wipe all traces of your use when you're done, and "forms auto-fill," which enters your contact info into Web forms with a single click. Its bookmarks and history features lack the visual simplicity of Opera's "speed dial" of favorite pages.

Firefox 3's system requirements also exclude many older PCs, while Opera touts compatibility as far back as Windows 95.

But when compared with the default browser on any new Windows machine, it's no contest. There may be no easier upgrade to your Web experience than a switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. And there may be no plainer evidence of the dimwittedness of PC vendors than their failure to ship Firefox or any other alternative browser on their machines.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com. Read more athttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward.