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.

Internet Explorer is making a comeback. IE9 brims with streamlined features, and it has finally updated to the smart address bar—so you can perform searches and input URLs in the same place. Page-load times are comparable to the other Internet browsers out there. The hardware-accelerated graphics and video are supposed to make websites act more like programs on your computer. Of course, the drawback is that you must have Windows 7 or Windows XP in order to use Internet Explorer 9.

If you do have Windows 7, you will enjoy how the OS and your IE9 browser work together. The Snap feature is a great way to view two pages of information at the same time, which is helpful for comparing prices, planning trip itineraries, and all kinds of other things. You can also pin sites that you visit regularly to your desktop and get mini updates from there without having to open the browser.

IE9 has joined the revolution of de-cluttering the browser. Buttons are sleeker, freeing up more space for the website. The tabs are oddly placed on the same line as address bar, which can quickly become cramped if you open up more than a handful of tabs at a time. You can give the tabs their own line, however, in which case they would scoot to the bottom of the address bar. This may still be a little behind the times, as most browsers have pushed tab placement above the address bar.

If you're still running Windows XP, you are stuck with Internet Explorer 8. Although IE8 did have a big feature overhaul of its own. Accelerators reduce the number of clicks required to perform everyday tasks, like translate words or get directions. Instead of opening up another window and copying/pasting the information there, highlight the desired text and click on the blue accelerator to view a map, a definition, or a translation—without ever leaving the page.

IE9 users can continue to make use of the accelerators as well. One of the most significant drawbacks for IE8 users is the lack of the smart, all-in-one search and address bar. Both installations require that you restart your computer.

Yahoo! Toolbar gives you quick access to what's most important to you. Preview your emails, latest news from your favorite sources, local weather, stock quotes, and more—straight from the toolbar. Perform Yahoo! searches, and customize the toolbar with flag themes.

The ability to personalize the apps on Yahoo! Toolbar can help free up some of the tab real estate in your browser. With the Yahoo! Messenger app, you can use a web page as your Messenger status and IM pages to friends.

When downloading the toolbar with Firefox or Internet Explorer, you will be asked if you want Yahoo! to be your default search engine. If you do not wish Yahoo! to be your default search engine, uncheck this option during pre-installation.

AVG Anti-Virus protects your computer from viruses, removes malware, and checks links on sites like Facebook to highlight potential threats. AVG's user base anonymously contributes virus data to the cloud, which helps keep the virus network up to date. You can choose not to contribute data during the download or later on in the options menu.

AVG installs quickly, so you're generally able to download it and start using it within five minutes. The antivirus protection of the AVG free edition is the same as the commercial editions. The free version gives users one-time access to PC Analyzer, which will clean all the errors it finds.

AVG's interface has been simplified with good-sized fonts and prominent buttons, delivering no-fuss navigation. The one-click "fix" and "update" buttons add to its ease of use. As far as features are concerned, AVG offers "smart scanning," which first scans files once and only rescans safe files when changes are detected. This ensures that scans are completed quickly. The smart scanner also prioritizes scans, so they don't interrupt your computer's other tasks. If you're working on something, AVG will only scan the most important cases while using less of the computer's resources to run the scan.

The LinkScanner scans links posted in Facebook and MySpace—awarding a green check or a red X next to the link, so you know whether it's safe or not. You can further evaluate suspicious links on AVG's Threat Labs website.

AVG is receiving top scores for malware removal and virus detection. West Coast Labs gave it a platinum anti-malware certification, ICSA Labs certifies it for virus detection, and Virus Bulletin honored it with the VB100% award.

AVG Anti-Virus' download is setup to automatically install the AVG toolbar and to make Yahoo! your default search engine. You can opt-out of both of these things during pre-installation. However, you will be required to register the product.

YouTube Downloader is a bit of a misnomer, because it does so much more than merely download YouTube videos. It also downloads Facebook, Vimeo, Google, Yahoo!, and other video types to be converted into other video formats. You can convert downloaded videos to MOV, WMV, AVI, 3GP, MP3, and MP4 for later viewing on your desktop or mobile device.

YouTube Downloader is super simple to use. Find a video—of non-copyrighted or personally owned content—that you'd like to download, copy the URL, and open the downloader. The URL will automatically be pasted into the downloader, so all you have to do is choose download quality and select where you want to save the video. You can even tweak the sound and volume settings and lightly edit the video by splicing it at chosen start and end times.

With the free version of YouTube Downloader, you are limited to downloading one video at a time. The one-step download and convert function is reserved for the commercial version.

YouTube Downloader comes bundled with the YouTube Downloader Toolbar and McAfee Security Scan. You can opt out of these by declining them during pre-installation.