We need to take advantage of our growing popularity and come out of our shell. We have to draw a line in the sand and deliver 1.0. How far away from that are we? I believe that we’re much closer than some might think. Yes, we know we still have bugs, and there have been some rendering regressions from 0.8, but fundamentally we are very solid, fast, lean, full-featured, and ready to plant our flag. Simon reminded me that we talked seriously at Netscape about declaring 1.0 when Safari came out. That was years ago. We could be on version 3.0 by now! Think about how many bugs Safari 1.0 had, or any 1.0 app. We can’t polish and preen forever. Real artists ship.

We’re also, in the court of public opinion, still competing with Firefox for mind-share. With them going to 1.5 this Fall, we’re falling further and further behind in the “version number war”. We know it means nothing, but which would most people rather have, Version 1.5 or Version 0.9? Not a hard decision for most. It’s not a real reason to make any decisions, but it’s yet another factor leading up to where we need to go.