There’s good news for fans of Firefox — the Mozilla Foundation announced late last week that it was halting development of the Mozilla browser suite. That foundation is the same group that oversees Firefox.

Why is this good news? Because the foundation had bit off more than it could chew. It simply didn’t have the resources to continue developing both Mozilla and Firefox. The strains were beginning to show, and Firefox was about to start suffering because of it.

The foundation was slow in plugging Firefox security holes. When it did getting around to plugging them, the installation procedure for the new version of Firefox was something that Microsoft might even have blushed at. I won’t go into the gory details, but take my word for it, in many cases it wasn’t pretty.

Now that Mozilla development is being halted, we can expect that Firefox will again get the attention it deserves. The announcement couldn’t have come at a better time, because Microsoft is hard at work in version 7 of Internet Explorer.

This is another piece of good news — I’m hoping that version 7 of IE will be a significant improvement over the aged, insecure, and creaky current version. Between the competition between IE and Firefox, I think we’ll see some real browser improvements over the next year.

Ah, browser wars…nice to have them back again.

What do you think about the Mozilla Foundation’s decision to stop Mozilla development?