For those of you that have been asleep for the past few months, and haven’t heard, Firefox 1.0 has just been released! This really is one of the biggest events in the history of the Internet, and the Mozilla site is struggling to handle the load. At the moment, trying to get to mozilla.org is slower than a standard issue, spyware infested copy of Internet Exploder. Firefox is as fast as ever, it’s just the server is overloaded. If you haven’t got Firefox 1.0 yet, get it via the FTP server, you’ll have a better chance.

As reported by MozillaZine, this milestone release of Firefox features a brand new start page. It’s not hosted on the mozilla site, it’s on Google – a smart move based on the amount of traffic (Google have got plenty of bandwidth to share). The new start page is also quite well designed from a marketing point of view: it features the most useful service available on the internet – a Google search!

It’s clean design is certainly a big improvement over the Firefox Product page, which is aimed more at users that don’t have Firefox yet. This one emphasises what a user actually wants to do: get on with browsing the web. It also features a short description about common keyboard shortcuts for new tab, bookmarks, history and search, which shows they’ve really thought about what a new user needs to know. They’ve also added links to a few of the important mozilla pages at the bottom for Firefox Central, About Mozilla, Mozilla store and how to get involved.

However, the page has been written in typical Google tradition, with no less than 51 validation errors and no DOCTYPE specified – it really takes advantage of what Firefox is good at… parsing, interpreting and guessing how to render junk built for IE! </sarcasm>

It really is a shame since part of the message about spreading Firefox is to be able to build with standards, yet the first page thust upon new users doesn’t really help with spreading that message.