Firebird becomes Firefox

The Mozilla Foundation announced yesterday the immediate availability of a new preview release of its next generation web browser: Mozilla Firefox - previously Firebird, previously Phoenix. You can also read more on the rebranding process (which I think is looking excellent) by the artists involved: Steve Garrity, Jon Hicks and Daniel Burka.

Mozilla Firefox 0.8 represents the bleeding edge of Internet technology and raises the bar for ease of use, performance, robustness and standards compliance. Less than 3 minutes to download over a broadband connection, Firefox can be yours in no time at all. Firefox starts up and runs much faster than Mozilla because of its significantly optimized code...

I'm going to love the new AutoDownload feature - Automatically download files to your Desktop or another location without windows popping up asking you where to save, etc. It also includes a new installer for Windows users - previously you had to manually extract the zip to a system folder.

And if that doesn't convince you to give it a try: Reasons to switch to the Mozilla Firefox browser.

Also released: Thunderbird 0.5, the e-mail and newsgroup client for 2004 and beyond.

UPDATE: The button at the top of this post is a PNG with alpha transparency, which does not render correctly in - you guessed it - Internet Explorer. Microsoft have had almost 8 years to fully implement the PNG specification yet haven't. How sad. Then again, it's taken them 6 months to release a patch for the most vulnerable security hole ever discovered in Windows.

UPDATE: 13 Reasons To Use Firefox Over IE