For several weeks now, I’ve been puttering away my evening hours working on a site whose goal is to spread the word about the Firefox Web browser. Spreadfirefox.com (dubbed sfx by some of us) will serve as the hub of a grassroots movement to promote this great Web browser. The software that drives the site is the same software the Howard Dean presidential campaign used during its successful online effort (the online part was effective; it was the offline part that failed). Mozilla released a preview release of Firefox 1.0 today, and we went live with the site simultaneously.

The site launch did not come off perfectly cleanly thanks to a Slashdot blitz that had me scrambling to cache images, perform CPR on the Web server, and ultimately stick a static page out in front of the dynamic content to serve as a speed bump easing load on the server. In spite of these issues, within four hours of the Slashdotting, we had managed to have 600-plus people register as site members. We’re anticipating thousands of users, but that’s not a bad start.

Maybe you’re not into evangelizing a given browser and so won’t find much of interest at sfx, but if you’ve found your way here and you’re using an insecure browser like Internet Explorer, I hope you’ll at least download Firefox and give it a shot.