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I don’t believe it…of all the things Firefox 0.8 brings to the table, such as next-generation browser features and phenomenal page rendering speed, all people can talk about is the friggin’ name…just let it go!

Like it’s daddy, the Mozilla Application Suite (aka “Seamonkey”), the Firefox standalone browser sports enhanced features such as tabbed browsing, popup window controls, advertisement blocking, and excellent web development tools such as the DOM Inspector and JavaScript Debugger. However, it fits all these goodies in a package in half the size, and with a simplified, more user-friendly interface.

While the plans to eventually replace the monolithic Application suite with the standalone Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client are currently up in the air, it is definitely a good indication of innovations yet to come from the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox 0.8 hints at a new level of professionalism within the Foundation with its sharp graphics and user-focused design.

Contrast the efforts of the Red Lizard with those of its major competitor. On the day of Firefox 0.8’s release, the chief security officer of Microsoft UK had claimed IE is “the most secure browser”…because they have patched up so many security flaws in it. By extension, the Ford Pinto must be the safest car of all time, since they recalled so many of those lemons. It is even more ironic consider the security flaw in question, the “URL spoofing flaw” that allows malicious websites to masquerade as benign sites in the browser’s status bar, took MS two months to fix. Not only did Mozilla and Firefox suffer from a slightly less serious version of this same flaw, developers had released patched beta versions (called “nightly builds”) for public download within 48 hours.

“In open source software development,” Steve Garrity wrote, “the usual reply to any requests, suggestions, or criticisms is the classic refrain: ‘Where