Firebird is available for a free download from Mozilla and is currently at version 0.7, which means it has not quite reached the point of being a fully stable product. Eventually Firebird will become the default Mozilla browser, although that won’t happen before it reaches version 1.5. But it’s certainly worth a try if you’re finding Explorer getting old. If, in its unfinished state, Firebird is this good, perhaps Microsoft should be worried.
Even the mainstream corporate/capitalist media know Microsoft is in trouble.
Mozilla (Firebird and Thunderbird and Nvu and … get the point? Mozilla is extensible) is going to come out of nowhere and win the browser wars once and for all. It should dominate well into the next decade. It’s growing in usability at an exponential rate; each new release gets better and better. Already it’s better than IE. The final nail in IE’s coffin will come when all of the plugins work seamlessly with it. It should be easy to install, with a standard Fedora or Debian package for all the useful Mozilla plugins. Here’s hoping.
But the victory in the browser wars is just the beginning. I predict a similar fate for OpenOffice.org over MS Office and for desktop Linux in general. It’s a matter of both momentum and the laws governing exponential curves.