Mozilla Firefox is the stand-alone webbrowser derived from the Mozilla suite. If you don't need an integrated mail client, chat client, html editor and more, then consider using Firefox as your browser. Other advantages:

• Easier installation of extensions, plug-ins and themes
• Easier configuration
• Faster, and requiring less memory (but that depends a lot on the installed extensions

Gnome users can set their default browser from the Preferences menu, item Preferred applications.

Users of other desktop systems may want to run gnome-default-applications-properties from the commandline to set the same preferences, since many programs look here to find out which application to start when a web link is clicked. Unfortunately, this doesn't work with all applications; KDE still uses its own browser, Konqueror, to open html documents and other web links.

Installing extensions is easy to do from the Tools menu. Choose extensions, and follow the link to the extensions archive at the mozilla firefox site. Installation is as easy as clicking the “install” button or link in the description of an extension. In most cases, you will have to restart firefox to activate the newly installed extension.