Mozilla 1.0 is on the way. Looks like a release candidate may be available next week. Yay! Of course, as a day-to-day browser it’s already damn fine.

Many criticisms of the Mozilla project for not yet releasing a version 1.0, while Microsoft continues to release major version after major version of IE, are unjustified. Mozilla is about so much more than the browser. Version 1.0 doesn’t mean that at last we’ve got a kick-ass and pretty bug-free browser/mail client/news reader/chat client/whatever. We already have that, as far as I’m concerned. As I read the Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto, 1.0 is a signal that at last we have a stable set of APIs to start building on.

What I’m waiting for is the next major release of Netscape 6. There is such a massive difference between Netscape 6.2.2 and the Mozilla 0.9.9 — not to mention the ever-so-improved nightly builds. At work, the standard browser is Netscape 4.78. Ugh. Thankfully there’s no interest in switching to IE, but until Netscape 6.3 or higher is released, I don’t want to start pushing for a Netscape upgrade. The day it’s released, though, I’m gonna start hammering away to get a decent browser on everyone’s desktop.