What good is a browser unless you can tweak it, hack it and bend it to your will? No good at all. The more you can hack it, the better it is. And that means that Firefox must be a great browser. It's infinitely customizable, via editing a text file called userChrome.css, making changes via a command called about:config, and using free add-ons to extend the features of the browser.

Have you ever tried to email or IM somebody a link from a site that has ridiculously long URLs, only to have the link break because it was too long or got cut off? The solution to this problem is to use a service like TinyUrl that turns a really long link into a really short link.

At Tectonic we love Firefox (and so do most of our readers). Over the course of 2007 we reviewed many of the best Firefox extensions available and now, as the year-end closes in, we offer the top-five of these that we could simply not live without.

Firefox benefits from a vast community of add-on developers and here are a few that will supercharge your every day browsing experience. One feature that distinguished Firefox early on was its support for tabbed browsing. But the default configuration contains some awkward behaviors when switching between tabs and opening new tabs.

New versions of favorite applications are always a little tricky; you want to keep up with the times without fixing what ain't broke. With that in mind, I took a look at the newly released Firefox 3 Beta 2 to see what we can look forward to when the final version ships in 2008.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 was released today across all platforms, Windows, Macintosh and Linux, in 25 different languages. Although not quite complete, it does have some impressive new features, such as a new Google Desktop style URL search bar, reduced resource hogging, better handling of passwords and download file types, but more importantly for Linux users, better GTK support.

Here are ten Firefox themes for web savvy children to enjoy this holiday vacation.

1. Super Mario Galaxy is here but you know how it all started. This Super Mario Bros. 3 theme gets you closer to Mario origins. (*)

The door is open again and registration available for Weave, Mozilla Labs’ application for synchronizing Firefox metadata online.

Mozilla has released the Firefox 3 Beta 2. As expected, this release is more about polishing the long list of features and improvements introduced during the previous nine milestones (eight alphas and a beta). But, as usual, there’s room for some noticeable changes.

Mozilla has announced the official release of Firefox 3 beta 2, the tenth major developer milestone in the Firefox 3 development timeline. The new beta, which is available for download from Mozilla's web site, includes interface improvements and a lot of extra polish.

I've just downloaded and had a casual fool around with Firefox 3 Beta 2 and I'm told that it has approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. However, what it boils down to is that it's even faster than the Beta 1 version and it is even easier to navigate.

Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for download. This is the tenth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.

Whether you refer to online maps occasionally or on a daily basis, you can add several extensions to your Firefox browser to make Web-based mapping services even more useful.

Adobe Acrobat was the first software to support Adobe Systems’ Portable Document Format (PDF). It is a family of software, some commercial and some free of charge. The Adobe Acrobat Reader program (now just called Adobe Reader) is available as a no-charge download from Adobe’s web site, and allows the viewing and printing of PDF files.

When you open a new tab (File/New tab, or Ctrl + T) you get a blank tab. If blank is too much for you, try adding some color and style to the blank page.

Mozilla Foundation, the organization behind the Firefox web browser, has defended itself against claims from sections of the Linux community that it has ignored Linux in the development of Firefox 3, the next generation of the browser. Mozilla's chief interface designer says Linux is very much included in the development project.

Mozilla promises big security strides in the upcoming release of Firefox 3, including access to a Google's database of malware-laced Web sites and a warning system that will alert users who are about to visit them. IT security professionals who have experimented with the latest beta say tweaks are needed but that the overall changes look promising.

Wide-screen monitors are great for productivity, but they have a dark side, too: they tempt you into keeping dozens of Firefox tabs open at the same time. Before you know it, the page titles in a long row of tabs become indistinguishable...

If you use Firefox all day, as I do, you may have mastered a few of the navigational tools it offers, but there are a lot of them under the hood. You can be faster and more efficient with the browser if you learn some easy ways to use your mouse and keyboard to navigate. In this post, I’ll round up 10 tips for more efficient surfing. Quite a few of these will work in other browsers as well.

In a recent blogg post John Lilly, chief operating officer at Mozilla, said that Mozilla estimated worldwide that at least 125 million unique users ran Firefox each month.