After 5 years, Firefox turns 1.0

Well its finally happened, Mozilla Firefox has hit 1.0! Its getting quite a bit of news coverage, so there is probably not a whole lot more to say here. I will say though, it has come a long way... far surpassing its heritage. If you have been along for the Web ride from early on, you will have realized that browsers started off as simple rather efficient tools, but quickly became bloated and yet lacked real innovation. Firefox 1.0 is lean and mean 4.7MB, and a completely different experience from the early Mozilla days, or even the repackaged Netscape 6/7 series. You may remember downloads of the later Netscape series as well surpassing 30MB. Until Firefox, Mozilla's browser code still had fragments of the original Netscape code which was open sourced in 1998... Firefox proves that aging and bloating software sometimes needs to be re-written. The Mozilla Open Source community proved that though the re-write process is a long slow road, it pays off. It is perhaps the luxury afforded the open source development process that is rarely an option in commercial software development: enough time and talent to do it right. If you haven't tried a browser other than Internet Explorer in a long time, its time to re-discover the web. If you like it, you'll find that switching is easy. And then you won't be vunerable to yet another IE security exploit.