Meet the next generation of Mozilla's Firefox Web Browser. This smarty pants comes with an Awesome Bar and an evolved, simplified interface with more ways to get organized and nix clutter.

As with most Web browsers, Firefox is chock full of features, functionality, and thousands of ways to personalize your browsing experience. Here are some of its notable features.

• The Awesome Bar (aka the address bar) is awesome sauce. Remembering URLs is becoming a thing of the past. Just type the beginning of the URL, page title, or key term, and the auto-complete feature finds ways to complete your search using information from your browsing history, open tabs, and bookmarked sites. Like other browsers with this all-in-one address and search bar, the more you use it, the smarter it gets.
• While tabs aren't anything to write home about, the app tabs are just peachy. Free up your tab real estate by pinning the sites you always keep open. They will be given a tinier permanent home on your browser. App tabs—like Twitter or Web mail—even light up when there are unread messages. You can also manage your tabs in Panorama view and group similar tabs together.
• Firefox integrates simple bookmark tagging with the Awesome Bar. Say you tag "gardening" for your favorite gardening sites. When you want to access those sites later, type "gardening" into the Awesome Bar, and you will see your tagged sites as results. If you're OCD about organization, you will love creating your own library of websites along with smart folders, which update automatically.
• The sync feature makes sure you have the same experience across all your Firefoxes—locating bookmarks and browsing history from wherever you are: in the office, at home, or on the go with Firefox for your phone. All data is encrypted before sending it on an encrypted connection to its servers. This means your data remains encrypted every step of the way. If you're so inclined, you can set up a personal sync server and manage the security of your data yourself.
• Finally, there are the pretty Personas. If you're a sucker for personalization, you will dig all the ways you can customize Firefox—from browser themes to moveable buttons to thousands of add-ons, including a growing number of restartless add-ons.

There are also lots of security and performance updates, which seem to improve with each rapid-fire Firefox release. The improved graphics, including the addition of a graphics processing unit (GPU) and hardware acceleration, are a real plus over previous versions. Aside from better graphics, it speeds up loading times by moving some image and video rendering tasks to the computer's graphics card.

Firefox still uses bucketfuls of RAM and user reviews still point to it being rather slow upon startup. Previous versions of Firefox tended to crash frequently, but improvements to plug-in crash protection have significantly reduced these problems. Some users report stability issues with running Firefox with Windows 7. Overall, where customization and ease of use are concerned, Firefox is keeping the browser playing field competitive.