As I'm talking about Mozilla this month, I should provide a bit of backstory. Search Slashdot's archives for the initial response to Netscape's release of the source: there was a famous three-month hiatus while the Mozilla Public Licence (MPL) was concocted, in order to give Netscape (now AOL) the right to use the Mozilla source tree in its proprietary releases. It's also worth seeing the response to every milestone release of Mozilla over the last four years: from the original, celebratory, 'I got it to compile!', to the routine of 'well, it's less buggy, and faster, and it'll be even faster when you strip out the debugging stuff'. For four years.

But, most of all, read Jamie Zawinski's gruntles. He was one of the first employees at Netscape. He turned his desk into a camouflage tent. Before that, he led the team which created Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs), the text editor that I use, much to my embarrassment whenever I encounter Richard M. Stallman.

And, if you pardon my language, I'm still proud of my coining the phrase 'asymptotic crawl to 1.0' to describe Mozilla's progress back in the November of last year. Though I must say that one of the reasons for upgrading my PC was, indeed, to get the most out of the damn browser. (Mainly, though, it was to play DVDs.)