As is typical, a day after submitting my review of Mozilla 1.1a, a nev version appeared, compellingly named '1.1b'. There are a few bits commented back in, now that they've been bug-tested, though I'd like to see mouse-gestures included as standard. And my Logitech Trackman Marble isn't recognised under the 'Mouse Wheel'. Nothing's perfect.

(I'd recommend a trackball -- especially the huge Marble FX -- for anyone suffering the symptoms of carpal tunnel from excessive mouse use. It's not much cop for Counter-Strike, but that's the least of my worries. And it allows me to cut down on desk space, which is always at a premium. It takes a little while to adjust, but I'd never use a mouse again.)

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.)

Mozilla is a breath of fresh air, though it takes a bit of oomph to run it properly. (And no, there's no reason you should upgrade your PC just to run a web browser. Tabbed browsing, especially, is sweet: though variations on Microsoft's MDI (the 'windows in windows' interface used in Office and elsewhere) are usually regarded as clunky and retrograde, it makes more sense to have control of your browsing under one window, rather than have dozens of windows cluttering the taskbar. (XP's grouping makes life easier, but only just.)

The RIAA has essentially shut down Audiogalaxy. As this was the file-sharing service that was best for digging out obscure, deleted, live, spoken word -- in essence, the tracks that aren't really robbing any musicians of anything but publicity -- it's the sort of foot-shooting exercise that you'd regard as insane from anyone else. But, of course, for the RIAA, it's a long, depressing habit.