The word balloon reads: "Suspected Web Forgery," and you have the options to "Get me out of here!" and "Ignore this warning." Unless you know the site, it's best to get out of Dodge. Doing so returns you to your home page, hopefully before the scam site sniffs out any personal data.

The warning in Microsoft's latest browser is nowhere near as obvious. Firefox's more dramatic approach is the better one. To see this in action, for yourself, without risking a real phishing site, point Firefox 2.0 at Mozilla's safe phishing protection test page.

The Firefox browser may not be the target of much malware or many phishing scams yet, but as its market share grows, and it becomes more mainstream, that may change. It's much better to be prepared.

Protected with Session Restore

I can attest to the advantages of this feature already. It saved me 30 minutes of writing work when a MacBook Pro computer that has been experiencing infrequent spontaneous restarts picked the wrong time to die on me. I had just finished a long, detailed blog post with lots of hyperlinks and was literally only seconds from making it live. When the Mac came back up, I launched Firefox: Not only was the Web page there, but so was my entire post. This feature alone is well worth upgrading to 2.0 for.