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The Mozilla Firefox 0.8 release has been so popular that it’s making a number of the main download sites for the browser and extensions, such as  ftp.mozilla.org and mozdev.org, extremely slow.  As the Mozilla community grows, there’s going to be an ever-increasing need to have a solid infrastructure in place to support the increasing amount of traffic. 

I’m impressed with the number of people that have started using this browser - people who I would have never expected to switch have done so.  You never hear the words “this site doesn’t work in Firefox”.

What make the evangelism so easy is the number of free browser extensions.  These extensions can be anything from developer-specific tools to custom applications for e-commerce.  I highly recommend you make use of the these three essential items:

• Google Bar: identical in function to the offical IE version, this Google Bar offers easy searching and result-hit hiliting. 
• Flash click to view: a plugin that replaces all flash content with a clickable box that starts the animation.  Eliminates all of those annoying driving cars, flying airplanes and other intrusive ads.
• Adblock: a plugin that blocks ads based on patterns. 

Overall, I’m very impressed with the polish of this 0.8 release.  It’s solid, fast and so far beyond IE in terms of standards compliance.  Given this, it’s not a stretch of the imagination to justify why CIO.com published an article that places Mozilla Firefox in the tier 1, “best of breed” open source category.  

With future IE upgrades being tied to future OS upgrades - remembering that they’re already a couple of years behind the times in terms of standards - it’s a good time to switch.