Thumbs Up For Mozilla 1.0

Category: Toys, Tools, Tech

Tuesday, June 18, 2002

So the Mozilla Organization, the open-source project launched by Netscape in 1998 when they released the source code of their Web browser, has after four years of development (!) finally managed to release version 1.0 of their new-from-the-ground-up browser.

The good news? It ROCKS!

I didn't think I'd ever be excited about a new Web browser again, but Mozilla has restored my faith. It is fast, stable, and offers a passel of features you won't find in Internet Explorer or anywhere else.

These include:

• Standards Compliance. Simply put, no browser follows Web standards as closely as Mozilla. This means that correctly authored Web sites will look better in Mozilla than in any other browser.
• Kills Pop-Ups Dead. That's right, with one click of the mouse in the preferences window you can permanently turn off those annoying pop-up windows. Even better, with third-party add-ons you can toggle pop-ups on and off right from the main browser window, so you don't lose them on those sites that require them to work.
• Tabbed Browsing. No more opening a new browser window just to look at more than one page at once -- Mozilla lets you open new tabs right in the browser window, so you can toggle easily between open sites without cluttering up the screen.
• Fully Theme-able. Don't like how Mozilla looks? No problem -- just download a new theme and give your browser a makeover. A dozen themes are available already, with many more on the way.
• Endlessly Customizable. Mozilla's interface is written in XUL, a language built from a combination of Javascript and XML. XUL allows you to add new features just by tweaking some text files, rather than having to edit the source code of the application itself. This open approach means that it's trivially easy for you to add a feature to Mozilla if you want to; dozens of add-on projects are already underway at mozdev.org.

Mozilla 1.0 is the closest thing to the perfect browser I've seen yet, and I've been browsing the Web since the days of Mosaic and Netscape 0.9. The next version of Netscape's browser, Netscape 7, is going to be based on Mozilla 1.0 too, which is an encouraging sign. The biggest challenge facing the Mozilla developers now isn't building a better browser -- they've already done that. The challenge now is to get that better browser into people's hands in the face of the overwhelming Microsoft monopoly. Here's hoping they succeed.