I’ve long been a fan of the Firefox web browser, and now I have even more reasons to sing its praises. Mozilla Corporation has recently released Firefox 3.

Right off the bat, there remains no comparison between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3. IE7 is clunky and slow, and Firefox 3 is sleek and speedy. With this new version, Firefox adds extra bits of class and function worth talking about.

The key improvement centers around the address bar, now renamed the AwesomeBar.

Both Internet Explorer and Firefox have long had an auto-complete feature for their address bars, by which the bar lists possible choices of web sites based on your first few typed characters. It’s a feature I depend on almost every time I use the address bar.

Firefox 3’s AwesomeBar has an improved display of its auto-complete choices, including favicon (a website’s address icon), tags, bookmarks, as well as complete web address and page title.

More important is the way the list is compiled. Using a logarithm called “Frecency”—a cross between frequency and recency — Firefox’s AwesomeBar lists the choices based on how recently you visited the site, how often you’ve visited it, whether it’s tagged and whether it’s in your bookmarks.

I’ve watched a lot of browser users ignore the auto-complete function, mostly, I believe, because they have to look at their fingers while they type. I urge everyone who uses the Internet frequently to catch on to auto-complete because it’s such a time saver. The AwesomeBar may make it harder to ignore.

Another nice feature of the AwesomeBar is that it displays an encrypted site’s security rating. When you log on to a secure site, such as PayPal or your bank’s, its security rating is shown not as a lock as in the past but as a favicon in a blue background. A favicon is the icon that identifies a site in the address bar.

Hovering over the favicon of a secure site with the mouse shows you its certification, usually by Verisign Inc., the leading certification company. Double-clicking on the favicon gives you access to the complete security information for the site.

This gives the Firefox user easy access to information about the site and a simple way to quickly note whether the site is the site you think it is. Thieves might be able to make you believe you’re at your PayPal account page through false addresses that look probable, but few if any can fake a certification.

Firefox continues its contract with Google to feature a Google search form to the right of the address bar. But don’t forget, you can type search terms right into the AwesomeBar, too.

Other new features include a facelift for the navigation buttons. I like the larger back button, which I use more often than the forward button, and the smaller refresh, stop, and home buttons.

Bookmarks are more manageable than ever and include the ability to tag websites. For example, a “newspaper” tag would group all your new reads, and “portals” would do the same to your My Yahoo, Google, and MSN custom pages.

Finally, Firefox 3 also meets or exceeds its conformity to HTML code and CSS rules for webpage display, reassuring web developers that what they design is what web surfers will see. Firefox outperforms all other browsers in this category.