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Oh, goody, FireFox 0.9 is here. And it's less than a 5 MB download. I have long since switched to FireFox for web browsing. I switched for the popup blocking but I stayed for the tabbed browsing.

Here are three reasons to switch web browsers today:

• You'll get fewer viruses and you'll get no annoying popups asking you if you want to install lame spyware that will ruin your computer forcing a complete reinstall.
• You can open all your bookmarks in tabs, all at once, and let them download in the background while you read them.
• You'll help break the Microsoft Monopoly on web browsers. Microsoft took over the browser market fair and square by making a better product, but they were so afraid that Web-based applications would eliminate the need for Windows that they locked the IE team in a dark dungeon and they haven't allowed improvements to IE for several years now. Now Firefox is the better product and there's a glimmer of hope that one day DHTML will actually improve to the point where web-based applications are just as good as Windows-based applications.

Students: Fog Creek Software has awesome summer internships in New York City. You get free housing, free lunches, lots of free New York activities, and a chance to write great code with great developers. And a competitive salary. Apply today: we only have four open positions and usually get hundreds of applications, which will be considered on a first-come, first-served basis.

About the Author: I'm your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz - the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot - the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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