i told someone on the plane that i was going to a conference for people who really love web browsers.

back in the netscape 4.7 days, the web browsing experience was getting pretty crappy. so i remember playing with internet explorer for a while, considering with some gravity whether it was time to switch browsers. IE 5 rendered webpages better and quicker, but the folders on their links toolbar wouldn’t allow me to arrange the bookmarks in any order other than alphabetical.

and that turned out to be the deal breaker. i sucked it up and stuck with netscape 4.7 until i got wind of the mozilla project (the open source project based on the netscape communicator source code), and begin playing with their browser around version 0.8. not before long, i was a mozilla convert.

now the sea is shifting is toward firefox which the excellent wikipedia describes as a small, fast, simple, and highly-extensible browser-only application separate from the Mozilla suite.