Hell froze over in the geek community yesterday as Mozilla 1.0 was finally released.

After nearly five years of work by thousands of developers, there was much rejoicing among the expectant fans and pigs were seen cruising at well over 1,000ft.

While gaining ground from Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape will be hard, open source browser Mozilla has something of a cross-platform advantage.

Where IE is only available on Windows and MacOS, and where Netscape is available on Linux and Solaris too, Mozilla has already been ported to FreeBSD, Irix, Unix and even BeOs, giving it a significantly greater reach.

But after four years of delays and slow progress it remains to be seen whether Mozilla, designed for standards compliance, performance and portability, can be a contender.

Mitchell Baker, 'chief lizard wrangler' at Mozilla, said: "As the browser has become the main interface between users and the web over the past several years, the goal of the Mozilla project is to innovate and enable the creation of standards-compliant technology to keep content on the web open.

"Mozilla 1.0 signals the advent of even further dissemination and adoption of open source and standards-based software across the web."

Tim O'Reilly, founder and chief executive of O'Reilly & Associates, added: "The Mozilla project has quietly become a key building block in the open source infrastructure.

"In addition to the open source Mozilla browser and the Netscape 7.0 browser, the Mozilla toolkit has been used to create additional browsers for platforms such as Linux and Mac OS X, instant messaging clients such as Chatzilla and the cross-platform Jabber client, and software development tools such as ActiveState's Komodo IDE."

Mozilla can be downloaded here.