As a professional website developer and geek, I spend a lot of time in a front of a web browser. As an efficiency freak, I care a lot a about how well it performs for me.

My current favorite browser is Firefox. It's easy to use for novice web users, while housing advanced features that demanding folks will appreciate as well.

Firefox launches quickly. This is a basic but important quality. The larger Mozilla suite that Firefox is descended from does not have this trait.

It runs on Mac OS X, Linux, Windows and Linux. This consistency across platforms helps minimize frustrations when switching computers. For people considering trying out Linux, running open source software like Firefox and OpenOffice can ease the transition.

Tabbed browsing has become essential to me. Tabbed Browsing refers the ability to display multiple web pages in one browser windows, each in it's own tab. It's a much faster and more organized than holding each page in it's own window, which may be hidden behind another. This feature is also available in Safari, Konqueror and several other browsers, but IE 6 still doesn't have it.

Type-ahead find is a time saver. With Firefox, I just start typing a word, and an incremental search for that word on the page will begin. This is faster and easier to use than using "Control-F" to pop-up a search box, which obscures the page I'm searching.

Excellent Rendering. Another fundamental feature done well. Firefox does an excellent job of rendering the most complex websites and does well adhering to the many established standards to web page rendering.

Simple, easy to use and customizable. Unlike the Mozilla suite, Firefox is just a web browser, without extra functions cluttering the interface. It's also easy to customize the toolbar. I like to remove all the buttons except for the forward and back buttons, and use keyboard shortcuts or menus for the rest.

Many extensions are available. There are many extensions and plug-ins available to extend Firefox in all kinds of ways. My favorite extension is the web developer extension. It adds an invaluable toolbar for debugging web page problems. My favorite feature is an option to display all the form tags directly as part of the page rendering. That's a time saver in the debugging process of my website development.

You may also be interested in my favorite text-based browsers for the unix console environment.