Attention nerds: September 15th is World Firefox Day. This is the big day to get your name “immortalized” by talking some schleb into downloading a copy of Firefox. For the uninitiated, Firefox is the open-source web browser based off of Mozilla, the open-source version of Netscape. Netscape, if you don’t recall, is the browser people used to use before Internet Explorer conquered the world in a bloody coup. In the spirit of World Firefox Day, I submit to you my reasons everybody should use Firefox:

• Tabbed Browsing. You can’t get it from IE without installing Maxthon, which is free, or by upgrading to version 7. You don’t want to upgrade, that would be bad.
• Tabbed Browsing. You can’t get it from Opera. Scratch that, Opera does it.
• The Acid 2 test. Firefox fails the test better than IE does.
• Memory leaks are fun. You always wanted to consume over 100 megabytes of RAM just to have a five kilobyte webpage open, right?
• If you are one of the Macintosh holdouts, you really should use Firefox. You see, Microsoft stopped making new versions of IE, and Safari is quite possibly the most insidiously bad browsers ever conceived, so Firefox is one of your few decent options.
• Bill Gates is evil. Unless you’re a third-world kid dying from a treatable disease and he’s sending doctors and medicine to you. But that doesn’t count, he was wildly-successful through the 80’s and 90’s and is therefore the Antichrist.
• Firefox used to be Firebird. Firebird used to be Phoenix. This browser has more names than Nyarlathotep.

All that aside, I tend to use Firefox more than I use IE, and use Opera solely to test for compatibility issues. The reason for this is largely inertia. The Internet Explorer 7 beta is reasonably stable and does everything I need it to, but I’ve grown accustomed to clicking on the little orange fox in my quick-launch bar.