The Mozilla Foundation is now one…
Time flies when you’re having fun.
It’s already been a year since the Mozilla Foundation was created, and it’s been quite a year. The Mozilla Foundation has prospered, our products are receiving rave reviews, consumer and enterprise interest in Mozilla products is at an all time high, the awareness of the importance of choice in browser software is growing and our community remains vigorous and energetic.
The Mozilla project has long been an open source technology leader. With our new Firefox and Thunderbird products, we are now focusing on bringing a better Internet experience to millions of new users.
The full Mozilla browser suite has been my main choice for since the end of 1999 in providing the best web browsing experience with it’s features and standards compliance. As Firefox, Mozilla Foundation’s standalone browser reaches version 1.0, critical mass has already been reached with it’s 0.9.x release in pursuading Internet users to ditch Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to either of the Mozilla Foundation’s product with US-CERT advising users it’s their patriotic duty to use an alternative browser such as Mozilla Firefox:
Use a different web browser
There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites. Such a decision may, however, reduce the functionality of sites that require IE-specific features such as DHTML, VBScript, and ActiveX. Note that using a different web browser will not remove IE from a Windows system, and other programs may invoke IE, the WebBrowser ActiveX control, or the HTML rendering engine (MSHTML).
Last but not least just yesterday, Microsoft had another unmagnificent seven of security related patches, with one for Internet Explorer and one for Outlook Express, another thorn in Microsoft’s side as far as security related bloopers are concerned.
Again The Mozilla Foundation comes up trumps as they have a fantastic standalone email client by the name of Thunderbird which is not vulnerable to security exploits of the type it’s Microsoft counterpart is.
Internet Explorer is (finally!) going the way of Netscape 4 and for the first time in a very long time, Internet Explorer’s overall market share has actually dropped, falling by about 1% since the US-CERT advisory in early June 2004.
If you’re still unconvinced about alternate browsers, just go download one and try them out… though be careful as once you’ve tried them, you’ll be kicking yourself why you didn’t switch earlier!
- Mozilla Firefox
- The standalone web browser with minimal learning curve for those migrating from Internet Explorer. Super compact sub 5 MiB download for Windows. Also available for Mac OSX, Solaris, Linux, *BSD, et cetera
- Mozilla Thunderbird
- The standalone mail client for Windows and UNIX
- Mozilla Suite
- The original Mozilla suite with web browser, mail client, HTML editor and other developer features
