Firefox 4 is officially released today by our friends at Mozilla, and it is awesome. Install or upgrade now.
In large part due to Mozilla’s leadership over the years, the Open Web is in good health. Open standards and open formats are becoming the norm. This means anyone, anywhere can develop innovative applications that will work in any modern browser, without asking anyone for permission or paying any fees.* See Mitchell Baker (chair of the Mozilla board) on why Firefox is more than just a great browser.
Note that CC Search is no longer included by default in the Firefox search bar dropdown list. This is eminently reasonable from a user experience and business perspective, about which we’ll post more soon. If you want to add CC Search to your search bar, you can do so from the CC Search beta interface; feedback encouraged.
Congratulations and thank you to everyone at Mozilla and everyone who benefits from Mozilla’s work — that means all 2 billion people who currently have access to the net, and hopefully soon the 5 billion people who do not yet have access — understand why any barrier to participation is a barrier too high.
* Except where content and data are concerned; that’s where Creative Commons comes in. Today let’s celebrate the openness of the web at the standards/protocols/formats layer.
I’ve been browsing the web with Mozilla since Firebird 0.6, but I only just read the Mozilla Manifesto two days ago. With these principles at its core, Firefox will always be more than just a great browser.
I as well have been using Mozilla since it’s earliest days, and cannot begin to imagine the cost to not only the Internet community, but to the world as a whole if these “guys” hadn’t been around all these years and if Microsoft had been the major player. The world is a much better place thanks to the active presence of this group for all these years, and the whole Mozilla community needs to be recognized and appreciated for the good they have accomplished for humanity.
To clarify, I’m not referring to the Mozilla and CC communities being recognized by means of awards, I intend recognition in the sense of these communities’ mandates being exposed and explained widely to the general public in an attempt to curb the “me, and only me matters” mentality that pervades today to a great degree, I submit, due to the absence of talk of service to humankind at the higher levels of our governments. It is no accident that Kennedy’s admonitions to the wealthy are never heard, that words like his of the wealthy’s responsibilities to others are squelshed and similar talk is not permitted in our mainstream medias:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFGMyyRURFM
The power elites do not, did not get to their positions of insane wealth by means of Godly powers, they live the lives they enjoy by means of the labour of the masses, and by exploiting the material commons of the peoples of all countries. They appropriate every country’s wealth for themselves, and for themselves only, at the expense of all others. It is reasonable to expect that part of their daily or weekly labour should be some effort to giving back, to improving living standards wherever it is required.