With the impending release of the newest version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, I figured it would be a good time to influence anyone who is still living under a shell to make the switch.

And while the official release of 3.0 hasn’t dropped yet, (due this Friday I believe), after using it for a few hours it looks like its the best browser yet. So without further adieu, here are 7 more reasons for you to switch from IE, Opera or whatever else you may be using like Lynx or Nutscrape.

1. More Secure

A big part of browsing the web is making sure you stay away from popups and virus’ that can make your surfing experience a living hell. Well now Firefox has allowed you to click on the site favicon to see who owns the site and to see if your connection is protected. Your identity verification is prominently displayed and is now easier to interpret.

2. Vast Performance Improvements

The latest release of Firefox has more than doubled the speed of their last relase, but perhaps the most staggering number is the 9.3 times it is faster than the Microsoft counterpart of Internet Explorer 7. So if you haven’t already made the switch, this fact alone is more than enough of a reason.

3. Smart Location Bar

Firefox 3’s address bar has a smart location bar so when you begin to type in a site or location, it will be able to interpret which site you are going to visit. The bar learns through repetition so the next time you type “Lo” it should take you to this site instead of Andrew Lo’s website.

4. Smart Bookmarks

The smart bookmarks function now allows you to place your bookmarks by how often you visit them. It will analyze your browsing habits and only show the most prevalent bookmarks sorted by “Most Visited”, “Recently Bookmarked” and “Recent Tags”

5. Improved Download Manager

The new download manager is much more streamlined so that you will never wonder where that lost download went. It will resume big downloads after crashes and it will also keep status bar info on your downloads without the need for the “Download Statusbar” plugin.

6. Add-ons Manager Easier to Use

The new and improved Firefox takes another step toward perfection with a vastly revamped Add-ons Manager that allows even greater extensibility with their extensions, which is one the main reasons I love Firefox. You can now search and install extensions/themes right from the manager pop-up box, without any need to visit publishers sites.

7. Overall More Useful & Intuitive Interface

On the first glance at Firefox 3.0 you can see right away that its about a million times better than IE will ever be, even with their oodles of money. The back button only appears if there is a page to actually go back to, and it is no longer on its own, it is now part of the address bar. Firefox 3 also enables you to increase the size of images and text, which can be helpful for those hard to read sites. There is stronger protection for phishing schemes and malware, as well as other tools that may compromise your computers security, and does so by checking against Google’s blacklisting.

All in all a very intuitive browser indeed. Not much else need be said, if you still use IE, well then your just ignorant. Do us all a favor and make the switch.