J. Carlos Navea – loconet

Yesterday, on the anniversary of the falling of the Berlin Wall, Everyone’s favorite little browser that could finally reached 1.0.
Some have started calling November 09, 2004 – Web Independence day!

For those of you who don't know, Firefox is a free (as in beer and speech), compact, extensible, fast and relatively secure web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of open source cross platform applications.

Firefox has various excellent end-user features such as tabbed browsing, built-in pop up blocker, download manager, live RSS bookmarks, among other nifty tools. Besides the great end user features, Firefox is built based on open standards, reason why as a developer, I love the program.

1.0 launch day was a very insightful day. I logged onto irc.mozilla.org to see what people were saying regarding the Firefox launch. Things felt like a party in the various Mozilla related channels, even my girlfriend joined us the geeks to discuss the launch. I got to see system administrators of the various mozilla.org servers scramble to solve the incredible surge in traffic on the servers. After all, they were getting 50,000 downloads per hour! I also got to hear live interviews with key developers for Firefox, including chief architect Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript. Shortly after the interviews were over, I witnessed the Mozilla community take interest in keeping this form of communication going and decided to maybe start an online radio station for Mozilla related content. Within minutes, an IRC channel was created to plan the project, technical requirement decisions were being made, people were being recruited, bandwidth and hardware was being donated. It was an interesting experience to witness the possible start of Mozilla Radio .