Congratulations Firefox

Firefox 1.0 will be officially launched on November 9. It's a nice milestone. And they plan to celebrate it. There is also a campaign to raise enough money for a full-page advertisement on New York Times (it appears they already have enough for two pages). For $30 you can have your name printed on the ad :)

Firefox is truly a great browser. I've been using since the days it was called Phoenix.
However, there is more to Firefox than meets the eye. Firefox is based on XUL. A definition of XUL is "a cross-platform language for describing user interfaces of applications". XUL is based on XML and has a rich set of UI components. This allows you to create complex interfaces in XML, with a clean separation between presentation and logic. The combination of XUL and Firefox means that you can make entire applications leveraged on Firefox. Thus, Firefox becomes a framework for complex distributed applications, that aren't suited for plain web pages. This is really a great thing and can boost creativity to create better distributed applications that go beyond HTML's limitations. And it appears some companies are already realizing this too.