The popular alternative to Microsoft Explorer, Mozillla’s Firefox, released it’s 1.0 preview on Tuesday. There’s been a steady increase in the number of Firefox installs as folks start to move away from IE in the wake of all its security problems.

On my personal site, I’ve seen Mozilla and Safari traffic grow to where it now represents over 25% of all the hits coming to the site.

Upon initial use, I see no significant changes except a for finding text on a page now brings up a cool little finder bar at the bottom and the words are highlighted on screen. Also, when you are on a secure site, the address bar changes color which is visually more noticeable than the little padlock icon which is the common convention.

Today I’m launching a new category to follow the march of progress of alternatives to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. After following Mozilla Firefox for several months, I’ve now made Firefox 0.9.1 my default web browser on my Windows machine. I’m impressed with the speed of it’s rendering engine and the open source aspect has added a healthy suite of plug-ins and extensions. The tipping point for changing the browser default came when I ran across an extension that allowed me to right-click on any web page viewed using Firefox and view that page within IE.

As a first post on Browsers, I link to a post on BoingBoing which outlines how quickly (31 hours!) the open source community was able to react to and patch Firefox in response to discovering a security vulnerability. This turnaround time is especially significant when put into context with all the recent hubbub over security holes for those using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer including an official warning from US-CERT.