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After the official demise of the Netscape browser back in 2003, it seemed as if Microsoft's Internet Explorer would dominate the browser market, well, forever. It was hard to imagine how or why anyone would invest time and resources to create a new rival.
But they did. Out of the rubble of Netscape was born the Mozilla Foundation, which took the code from Netscape's browser and used it to create the Firefox browser. Tuesday, Mozilla released version 3.0 of the browser, causing such a stampede of downloads that its servers crashed.
Despite that glitch, Tuesday was a day to celebrate both a product and an organization that represents what is best about Silicon Valley and its culture of innovation. Mountain View-based Mozilla adopted the open-source model for the browser, inviting anyone to help write the code for Firefox, and in the process built not just a product, but also a movement.
In the process of harnessing the brainpower of thousands of contributors across the globe, Mozilla has built a community that is motivated by a desire to innovate and improve rather than the riches promised by options and IPOs.
What will ultimately matter to most consumers is that the new version, Firefox 3.0, performs better than its predecessor and comes with several new features.
These new features include the "Awesome Bar," a name that manages to be both ridiculous and appropriate. The Awesome Bar adds a kind of search function into the address bar that will make finding previously visited Web sites easier and more intuitive. |
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