Two big releases today. First, Mozilla has released Firefox 1.0. Unfortunately, Mozilla’s site has been swamped with traffic.

The Mozilla Foundation said it had been bracing for a wave of users and took additional precautions prior to the launch.

“One thing in the last several weeks we’ve done to prepare for the arrival of Firefox 1.0 is to beef up our server capacity,” Chris Hofmann, engineering director at the Mozilla Foundation, wrote in an e-mail. “The traffic we received for the preview release was greater than anything the foundation had experienced. We did some planning and estimation around this prior to the 1.0 launch, and today the traffic is far exceeding our expectations.”

The Firefox website seems to be accessible now, although it (and every other Mozilla site) was very slow for me, when I downloaded the new version earlier today.

The other big release today was Halo 2. Now, if only I had an Xbox.

UPDATE: In case you need motivation, here’s a good reason to switch to Firefox. And one more for good measure.

UPDATE II: More coverage of the Firefox release from the BBC.