On February 15th, exactly 99 days after it was released, Firefox 1.0 smashed through the 25 million download milestone.
By now, anyone vaguely interested in the Internet should have picked up that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 is, quite frankly, not up to the job. It is unsecure, potentially dangerous, and not particularly user friendly. It is so bad that Microsoft, who previously said that IE6 would be the last incarnation of Internet Explorer, are having to bring it out of retirement and release IE7 to fix the bugs.
By the same note, anyone who has been watching the news – especially in the States – should have heard of this new wunder-browser, Firefox. It’s an open source program (which means that the code behind it has been developed by a community of volunteers who have donated their time, skill and the finished product to the web as a whole), so it’s free, incredibly easy to use, and (much as I hate to say it) the best thing to hit the Internet since Internet Explorer 4.
Now, Firefox is also standards-compliant: this means that it displays web pages the way they should be displayed. If you view this website in IE6, you’ll see it differently than I intend for you to see it. You see it the way Microsoft thinks you want to see – OK, no problem there… but it’s my site, not Microsoft’s!
Firefox is incredibly customizable – you can skin it, add extensions, and completely reconfigure how you use it. If you look at this screenshot of my Firefox, you can see what I’ve done to it.
I’ve been using Firefox since version 0.7 – when it was still in beta (and called Firebird, of all things – even before that, it was called Phoenix) and have absolutely no problems. I love it.
And I urge everyone who isn’t already using Firefox (my parents…) to switch over as soon as you can, especially if you’re still using IE6. You really won’t regret it!
Following in the footsteps of Scaryduck, I’ve decided that my brother will write today’s blog entry. He doesn’t know yet.
