I decided to upgrade my copy of Firefox 3 Beta5 to the recent Release Candidate today so I downloaded the source code and compiled it.

When it completed and I launched the browser, I was greeted with something quite unexpected.

Instead of my browser window opening as it was supposed to do I was given a End-User Software License Agreement (EULA) screen which would not let me use Firefox until I agreed with the terms and conditions.

While Mozilla has had a EULA since Firefox 1.5 or so they have never brazenly shoved it into the end-user's face until now. It immediately set me on edge because this behavior is indicative of proprietary software and not something you would expect to see when using something that is open source.