The long national nightmare is over: the beta of Netscape Navigator 9.0 has finally been released to the public.

Read the official announcement here.

Read a more informal introduction to the browser here.

Download it here.

Read the release notes here.

Discuss it here.

This is Sam, the resident pet at the Yellowstone Basin Inn in Gardiner, Montana, where we stayed for a night on our way back from Yellowstone. (A very nice place, by the way. I highly recommend it.)

After a week away from the Internet, his Flickr-colored tags seemed to be saying, "Come back, Chris... Come back to the Web..."

Jeff Harrell sums up my thoughts on the matter better than I could have.

"What happened last night wasn’t a revolution, [...] what happened last night is that a bunch of kids on the playground banded together to beat up another kid, a kid they saw as richer or more powerful or more snotty than them. “The teachers can’t expel us all,” they said, so they put the other kid in the center of a big circle and took turns punching him, then turned out his pockets and took his lunch money."

Jeff's blog is definitely one of my favorites to read, and this post is a good example of why.

Wow, the Internet gets annoying on April Fools day. The best April Fools jokes are subtle pranks, not long, drawn-out, unfunny "jokes," and they do not include the phrase "this is not a joke." I'm turning off my computer and I'll come back online tomorrow when things have settled down.

PC World's list of the 50 most important people on the Web that came out today includes at #50 Tila Tequila, a model whose claim to fame is having almost 2 million MySpace friends. I mildly disagree with a few of the other choices like

• including Nick Denton/Gawker Media (45) without mentioning Jason or Weblogs Inc.
• placing Kos (24) above Jeff Bezos (25), Kevin Rose (32), and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (46)
• having David Farber on the list - mailing lists are not Web-specific

but including Tila at all is a disgrace. What's so important about yet another model on the Internet? Here's a newsflash: MySpace users are not picky about whom they add as friends, especially when it comes to naked women.