I switched over to Firefox a while ago, while it was called Firebird (version 0.6). I was immediately drawn by the simple and useful user interface, that I decided to stick with it since then. It was not the first time I had seen a browser with a tabbed interface, but I felt that it was a better experience than Opera. Over the years, I have upgraded faithfully from the first changeover to Firefox to the latest one (version 1.04 is what I have now). I can hardly believe that my favorite web browser has now reached version 1.5!

For all the discussion about the security holes in Firefox, I have so far never encountered any nasties in the years that I have spent traversing the web. This is in contrast to my experience with Internet Explorer up to version 6 which certainly makes using Firefox a no brainer. If ever I encounter problems with Firefox, it was early on when it had just become known as Firefox, due to to a combination of bugs in the browser and the fact that in those days people(web designers) seemed to think that it was OK to test their site in IE only. These problems, however, I experience less and less these days thanks to bug fixes and awareness in the web design community about standards (don’t get me started on the support for standards in IE).

I still remember the days when the browser world consisted of Internet Explorer and Netscape. I had both installed, plus Opera so I can use them to visit different websites and to test them in different browsers (blink tags anyone?). I had a brief affair with Netscape 4.7 then version 6.0 and then I switched to Mozilla, mainly due to the fact that Mozilla will also run on Linux (never was much of a fan of Konqueror myself). When I heard that there was a new browser that was lighter than Mozilla called Firebird, I immediately jumped ship and used Firebird all the time.

Now, I am upgrading all my machines to Firefox 1.5 and virtually everybody I know is using it for their everyday browsing needs without any regrets. Congratulations to everyone on the Firefox team!

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