And at the end of the day the Internet is still all about Software. - Marc Andreessen

Well at 10:00 PDT (17:00 UTC), Firefox 3 was to be officially released. According to ZD Net, as of 10:14 PDT, GetFirefox and Mozilla were both down - I got a time out when I checked. The developer blog is up. I can wait and I am not complaining.

Given a little bit more time and research and guts, when I launched my firm I would have done so entirely open source. For the small business person, voice over internet protocol, open source software, and advances in networking over the last five years or so have dramatically knocked down the costs of running a professional office. But, like many new business owners, we were persuaded that long-term contracted, commercial, software applications were better than existing alternatives. We were told by the regional Bells that old-school business phones and service were the way to go. Ultimately we have a mix of both in our office. We could see equally valid arguments for using big box commercial or open source. Except when it came to our browser software. We love Firefox.

I am not technologically savvy enough to tell you why using Firefox is better. Michael Calore at Webmonkey does a good job of that. I can tell you that Firefox loads faster, integrates better, and has a host of add-ons that extend the browser's capabilities. It is just more integrated in a way that is hard to explain.

So, I am patiently awaiting Firefox 3. Checked again, still down ... wait ... a post from Mozilla. Good luck and thanks to all the people at Mozilla who tell us they will start Download Day once the servers are back to normal.