The post I made earlier about Firefox 0.9 was the release candidate, and was a way to find bugs to make the final 0.9 release stabler and better for mass consumption. The time has come, and 0.9 is now final and available for everyone to download and use at once. Why get excited about a browser? Because it is the future of the web. It supports web standards, which is better for me as a website designer, and better for you as a web surfer (me too) because you see the web the way it was meant to be seen and enjoyed. Don’t waste your time with Internet Explorer/AOL or the other browsers anymore, Firefox is the supreme.

New in 0.9 are these features (among the usual stuff, like popup blocking, tabbed browsing, and easy searching via Google):

• New Default Theme

  An updated Default Theme now presents a uniform appearance across all three platforms – a new crisp, clear look for Windows users. Finetuning for GNOME will follow in future releases.

• Comprehensive Data Migration

  Switching to Firefox has never been easier now that Firefox imports data like Favorites, History, Settings, Cookies and Passwords from Internet Explorer. Firefox can also import from Mozilla 1.x, Netscape 4.x, 6.x and 7.x, and Opera. MacOS X and Linux migrators for browsers like Safari, OmniWeb, Konqueror etc. will arrive in future releases.

• Extension/Theme Manager

  New Extension and Theme Managers provide a convenient way to manage and update your add-ons. SmartUpdate also notifies you of updates to Firefox.

• Smaller Download

  Windows users will find Firefox is now only 4.6MB to download.

• Help

  A new online help system is available.

• Lots of bug fixes and improvements

  Copy Image, the ability to delete individual items from Autocomplete lists, SMB/SFTP support on GNOME via gnome-vfs, better Bookmarks, Search and many other refinements fine tune the browsing experience.