> Thanks. I knew the truth was somewhere in that ballpark.
The old Netscape "Suite" (Navigator browser, Email, and Composer HTML editor) had gotten way too bloated and slow, and had gotten stomped into the ground by IE in the late-80's browser wars.
So some bright kid decided to write Firefox as the browser part only, make it small and quick, but keep the basic Netscape look-and-feel, and compete with IE now that Netscape had long lost that battle. The idea would be to make it open-source, cross-platform, portable, and cool.
Of course, it grew, including some of its own bloat, but it's stayed pretty true to the original notion.
The original Suite survives as the Mozilla SeaMonkey project, and even though my browser is Firefox and my email is Thunderbird, I have SeaMonkey around to this day, for the Composer HTML editor.
Gotta love that "bright kid", whoever he is.
I first became aware of Firefox through a very computer literate friend (a computing guru/savant, actually) maybe five or six years ago. He wouldn't leave me alone until I dumped IE for Firefox.
After using it for only a short time, I was highly impressed with how superior it was to IE. I've never looked back, and have converted every IE user I know.
Once in a while, I have to open IE for some MS-only application. I always close it as soon as I'm done, and re-open Firefox. IE just can't hold a candle to Firefox for user friendliness. I also avoid IE because of its well-known vulnerabilities to malware.