Exactly! I've been using Firefox for a looooong time -- since before it was "Firefox", actually! My name's in that full-page ad that was placed in the New York

Exactly! I've been using Firefox for a looooong time -- since before it was "Firefox", actually! My name's in that full-page ad that was placed in the New York Times to commemorate the 1.0 release and, of course, I used Netscape before that. Over this time, Mozilla has certainly made some "goofs" (to put it nicely). They've done several things I wasn't real thrilled about -- especially in the last couple of years. The default settings should absolutely be tightened up. There are some valid criticisms in this article and I can't -- won't -- try to defend them. My own "preferences file" is several hundred lines long and gets installed on my machines before I launch Firefox for the first time because, yes, it makes an absurd number of outbound connections on startup. Firefox is the "mutt" of web browsers. They all suck, Firefox just sucks less. Even with all of the legitimate criticisms and screw-ups on Mozilla's part, Firefox is still a tremendous improvement over Google Chrome, which isn't allowed on my machines. The closest I come is having Chromium installed (from the Debian package repositories!) and that's reserved for the rare case when I need to use a different browser for a few minutes. Mozilla Firefox certainly isn't perfect, but it could be sooooo much worse!