With parties planned in places from the Maldives to Paris to celebrate the official release of Firefox 2.0, Mozilla community coordinator Asa Dotzler said Tuesday Firefox was more than a browser — it’s a movement.Dotzler’s job is to keep the Fire in Fox stoked, and reaching 2.0 is reason for a global party, he says. Launch parties are scheduled roughly for Oct 27 and located via Google Maps at the firefoxparty.com site.You might ask, what does a crop circle, space balloon, sidewalk chalk and a NY Times ad have in common? They highlight the long lists of wacky events Firefox fans have organized to celebrate major milestones for the Firefox browser. To celebrate the release of Firefox 2, Firefox fans are being equipped with the tools to plan launch parties around the globe… There are currently over 375 parties playing host to approximately 3300 Firefox fans who will be celebrating the launch of Firefox 2 this week. Enthusiasts as far south as Antarctica and as far north as Norway have registered thus far and the attendee list is still growing. You can check out a map detailing the party locations in real-time at the Web site.But aren’t we talking about a Web browser, after all? How does a browser stir so much interest for people to contribute? Dotzler said as many as 20,000 people signed up to test 2.0, and that Firefox was spreading at nearly 350,000 downloads a day with little traditional advertising. It doesn’t hurt that bigger groups are getting cool swag like T-shirts and messenger bags to celebrate, but the bottom line with the movement: “Everyone wants to be part of a club,” Dotzler said.But this club would not be the place to be if the movement was not producing “something good”, he said. “[The Firefox development team] is the most experienced group of browser developers in the world.”And with open source being just that, their hard work is giving life to next-generation browsers such as Flock, which is based on Firefox. The co-founder and chief strategy officer of the social browser Flock, Geoffrey Arone, said its upcoming 1.0 release was being built on Firefox 2.0 and would be ready in December.Arone says Firefox 2.0 is a just a starting point, and Flock — aimed at “the Web’s evolution from a passive to a fluid, participatory medium” — is just a “better browser”.While the Firefox team pores over code and nails the development, and has released some solid refinements to the interface, Arone said, Flock pores over what people do on the Web in their browser to make it more about “… the change in Web user behavior and experience from just ‘looking’ at the Web to ‘making’ the Web”. He said it’s not as if people are not already sharing photos via e-mail and blogging to share thoughts, but Flock will just make it easier and seamless to find and share while browsing. “It’s the actual interplay of things,” he said.The latest batch of usability research: University of California students.And one of the main feature for Firefox 3.0, as outlined by Dotzler, is coming to Flock in 1.0 — searchable history. No more trawling day by day through history to find that URL. Each page is indexed and searchable, much like in Mac OS’s Spotlight. Sounds very promising, and one more benefit of open source for development — a little variety.But if it’s IE7 vs. Firefox 2.0 for you, take a look at sister publication PC World’s in-depth comparison.Do you welcome the return of the Browser Wars? I do. Talk back to us below. Software DevelopmentTechnology Industry