Now that Songbird has abandoned Linux, where will we turn for a browser-based music fix? Not to worry, you can still find plenty of add-ons and extensions for Firefox and Chrome to turn them into excellent tools for finding and listening to music.

Thanks to its extensibility, Firefox quickly became the favorite browser for most power users. But while extensions are a great way to make Firefox more functional, Mozilla's designers are also currently thinking about a complete redesign of the way the browser looks and feels, in order to keep up with changing usage patterns.

Installing these Firefox extensions, like installing any other Firefox extension, is just a matter of clicking the shiny green Install Now button from the extensions' homepages. You'll find both the extensions enabled after a browser restart to complete the installation.

If you spend most of your computing life in Firefox, it makes sense to consolidate other online activities in your browser. There are extensions that can help you to do just that: you can manage your bookmarks with the del.icio.us extension, chat on IRC channels using Chatzilla, and read RSS feeds in Sage.

Nowadays, Web browsers can act as front ends to many other kinds of applications. For instance, if you want to browse and open the files on your hard drive from within Firefox, turn to the Firefly extension.

The pace at which Mozilla works can seem insane. It was less than a month ago when the the company released Firefox 3.5. Only three weeks later, Firefox posted screenshots of Firefox 3.7, which includes a change to the Tools bar and an Embracing Glass design.

But the ambition doesn’t end there. The Firefox team is looking even farther in the future: all the way to Firefox 4.0.

The Firefox browser stores not only a user's bookmarks, history, saved forms, and usernames and passwords, but frequently also several extensions and themes. When you're switching computers or distro-hopping, replicating the browser environment can be tricky and time-consuming.

I mentioned yesterday that I’ve been hunting some things down for Epiphany, the GNOME web browser, and I was hoping that Epiphany 2.24.1, the current version in Ubuntu Intrepid, was good enough to let me kick out Firefox when version 3.1 comes out.

Firefox is a very useful and feature-rich browser, we all know that. But aside from being a robust Web browser, Firefox is appealing to more sophisticated users because of the support that it gets from third-party application developers.