Gavin, 15 January 07
I have been a regular user of mozilla technologies for some time. I’ve used and contributed since the times of the 0.7 mozilla suite. Currently Firefox and Thunderbird get daily use as my prefered web and email clients.
I thought I’d share my firefox toolbar:
An ultra-compact affair that allows all the navigation that I need from a slimmed down interface. The n and LM buttons allow quick access to a selection of regularly used bookmarks and live bookmarks (RSS feeds). I also make use of a good number of search keywords (for example allowing me to type g search-term in the address bar to search google for a term).
The mozilla project has come a long way in the past few years and can be seen as quite a success for open source software. This is a development model that promotes free access – nobody owns exclusive rights to the code for the browser.
While this has always been the underlying model for the mozilla suite – it has relied upon heavy support from Netscape – then AOL in earlier stages. Recent development has been funded through tie-ins with the google search engine.
The fact that the code was open source is what allowed Firefox to be branched from the application suite and succesfully developed as a stand-alone browser by some individuals involved in the project. This was despite the intentions of the AOL teams steering the project who intended that it continue as a bundled suite for email; web browsing and development. In this sense the freedom offered by open source is about much more than a ‘free’ browser as in zero-cost. It is the freedom offered by unlocking potential to create without constraints.
