As of yesterday (Saturday, September 18, 2004), Mozilla Firefox has gotten over one million downloads in less than 5 days. That's pretty damned good, but I think we as an Internet community can do better. They're aiming for another million downloads in the next five days. So if you're not using Firefox, click on the little button off to the right there and get browsing! If you're curious as to what Mozilla Firefox is, just click "Read More".

History of Mozilla

When Netscape saw that its ship was sinking and that it was losing the browser war, there were several options open to it. It could have sold off its assets. It could have stayed on as a reduced-size company with an inferior product. It could have tried to reinvigorate its product. Or it could do what it did do- open source Netscape. The Mozilla Foundation was born. It took them several years to release Mozilla 1.0, but it was a good browser. Netscape 7.0 was based on Mozilla 1.0. However, Mozilla was a big browser- it packed a full suite of Mail Client, Web Browser, IRC Client, Calendar and Address Book. And its method of displaying text was, frankly, rather unattractive. So it was time for a new browser.

History of Firefox

Initially, the new browser was to be called Phoenix. However, some legal threats from the makers of Phoenix BIOS's put an end to that. Then the browser was to be called Firebird. However, the Firebird Relational Database project nixxed that. So finally (in time for 0.8), a name was chosen: Mozilla Firefox. Let's hope nobody decides that they own -that-.

Why should you use Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is available for many platforms, including but not limited to Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BeOS, Solaris, AIX and OS/2. So chances are good it will run on any machine you have in your home or workplace. But why should you give up a perfectly good version of Internet Explorer for Firefox? Let me give you a bulletted list:

• Tabbed Browsing- View multiple pages in one window
• Built-in Google Search Bar
• "Live Bookmarks"- also known as RSS. Read your news quickly and easily
• Multiple homepages- using tabs, you can set multiple homepages to launch together (in the Options, set your homepages to as many URLs as you want, separated by | )
• Download manager- save yourself from hundreds of download windows
• Easily expandable via Extensions and Themes
• Standards Compliant rendering including the alpha layer of PNGs and full CSS support
• Small download and small memory footprint
• Fast page rendering
• Much, much, much, much, much more secure than Internet Explorer
• Did I mention it's more secure than Internet Explorer?
• Sidebar functionality allows you to view things like Bookmarks and even whole websites in a separate frame
• Built-in Popup Blocker!

Interested yet? Well, I hope so. So go download Firefox. There's no excuse to use Internet Explorer for any reason whatsoever. Have you ever been infected with spyware? Well, you won't be with Firefox. There's no ActiveX to leave gaping security holes in your system. And with it's increased functionality vs. Internet Explorer, what are you waiting for? Get going!