Mozilla's Firefox Makes Formal Debut Today

The open-source application already has a cult following, many of whom like it because viruses and worms aren't written for it in the same number that they are for Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE). Others like the Google search field that is built into the toolbar. Still others like the tabbed browsing that simplifies moving among different Web sites.

Testimony to Mozilla's sudden embrace by users is the fact that eight million users downloaded its "preview version" between now and the time it was released in mid-September.

Firefox has already received wide praise for its stability. "Open-source projects have a much higher standard," the Mozilla Foundation's engineering director Chris Hoffmann told the Reuters news service. "It's the engineers who actually build the software who label it as done."

Although it's the latest craze in personal computing, Firefox' underpinnings are from the dustbin of computing: its original source code came from Netscape Communications, which set the code free into the public domain in 1998, when it was acquired by America Online. Microsoft had already won the browser wars by then.

Microsoft is betting on a new browser under development for scheduled release with a future version of Windows. In the meantime, the software giant is betting that Firefox's incompatibility with many Web sites will keep Internet users in the IE fold.