That's One Foxy Browser

For the uninitiated, Mozilla Firefox has been the long-developed open source alternative to Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari. I remember when the gecko engine that it uses was first being written from scratch at Netscape many years ago. I downloaded it and it was very much in disarray, as you might expect from an alpha demo. Years went by, and Mozilla became it's own company disctinct from Netscape. The Mozilla browser suite continued to grow more bloated than was needed, adding a built-in email client, chat client, and web editor. Purists demanded a clean standalone browser, so the Phoenix arose from the proverbial ashes to fill the gap, for legal reasons was renamed to Firebird, and once again renamed to Firefox. Today, it finally reaches the long-awaited version 1.0. I've been using Firefox non-stop for over a year, now, and I love it. I never see a pop-up ad, no problem with randomly installed toolbars or bookmarks on my machine (like I have to deal with at work every day), and it's very efficient. You can open your pages up in new tabs across the top of the browser window, instead of having a dozen copies of the browser open in your taskbar. Firefox even has an RSS feed handler built in in the form of "live bookmarks." And if you ever want to add functionality to your browser, there are lots of user-created extensions available for download that can do everything from inserting bulletin board codes to update your LiveJournal to syncronize your bookmark list across multiple computers to download every file of a certain media type on a page to blocking advertisements to even acting as an FTP client. If you haven't yet given Firefox a look, you should try it today. At the very least, every web page author should add this to their browser testing arsenal.

You can download it for Windows directly from Mozilla's currently overloaded servers or you can probably get it faster by using the Official Firefox 1.0 torrent to spread out the bandwidth load across almost a thousand users.