I finally made the upgrade to Firefox 3. The speed enhancements are incredible - it screams! Other notable improvements include an incredibly improved address bar (it's very Apple-Spotlight-inspired), a very nice new download manager, and some significant usability enhancements to the add-on manager. MozillaLinks has a thorough review of the changes.

Unfortunately, like all Firefox upgrades, there are quite a few of my favorite add-ons that are no longer compatible. Hopefully they will be updated soon, because now that I've used FF3 for a few days, there's no going back now!

I've been playing around with Yahoo's YSlow Firefox add-on. It gives a lot of great insight into factors that make web sites slow. While not all of the suggestions apply to small web sites (such as the suggestion to use a content delivery network), it's a definite must-have for any web developer's toolbox!

Three new excellent Firefox extensions that I discovered this month:

• FireBug - Excellent Javascript debugger
• Unread Tabs - Simple, useful, effective
• IETab - Embedes IE in a Firefox tab. Very nice!