Posted on 12/26/2004 3:13:35 PM PST by mathprof
Forty-five days and some 13 million downloads after its official release, Mozilla's Firefox browser is showing undeniable momentum--but does it signal the beginning of the end to Microsoft's monopoly over the basic software used to access the Web?
Even as Firefox gathers steam, powerful brakes are poised to kick in that could limit its long-term growth: Interoperability has long dogged non-Microsoft browsers, which are often glitchy on some Web sites. Firefox claims some significant progress on this front, but a handful of sites, including Microsoft's Windows Update site, are still inaccessible.
In addition, Microsoft's deep hooks in corporate IT departments could make it impractical for many businesses to consider switching from Internet Explorer for the foreseeable future. Microsoft, for one, sees those hooks as a staunch bulwark against corporate defections, keeping its most profitable customers close to the fold.
"We hear from many thousands of business customers that Internet Explorer is an extensible and reliable platform upon which thousands of line-of-business applications have been built," a Microsoft representative said in a statement. Since its launch last month, Firefox has already nudged Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser below the 90 percent mark for the first time in years, according to one survey. Now the question is whether the Web browser can surmount thorny market dynamics to become more than just another niche player among the crowd of lilliputian rivals that have long stood in IE's shadow.
... Now, from seemingly out of nowhere, the group has set its sights on achieving 10 percent market share in the browser market by 2005.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Before we get Micro$muft, er, KwasiOwusu giving us his Micro$oft spin on here, let me make a few observations.
The reason M$ moved to give away IE (and kill Netscape) circa 1995 was that it saw browsers as the only viable replacement to Windows. There are many stories of Bill Gates going nuts with fear that a machine that ran only a browser could replace Windows, so he moved agressively to give away IE.
Of course, this landed Microsoft in court during the famous anti-trust trial. M$ claimed that IE was unseparateable from Windows, being an integral parts of the code. Obviously that claim was found to be bogus in a heartbeat. Firefox (aka Mozilla) proves that a third-party browser works just fine, unless M$ embeds secrets in the OS (which was the heart of the lawsuits in the USA and the EU).
This belief, this fear, continues inside the executive offices at Redmond. I can assure you that M$ execs, at its Partners Conference last summer, went out of their way to trash both Firefox (aka Mozillia) and Linux. These two products form the best competition for M$, really the first competition in a decade.
What you can expect is a lawsuit against Firefox from an obscure company. It will be funded by a venture capital company that was "introduced" to that obscure company by M$. How do I know this? Because this is exactly what happened as SCO sued Daimler, Novell, AutoZone, IBM, etc last year. While this lawsuit won't win, it did slow down Linux for a while, and a while is a lifetime in the computer world.
tech ping....
My IE crashed, I didn't want to download over my modem the hughe file to replace it, so I downloaded Firefox and like it - the tabs are great.
It's not just Quasi we have shilling for dollars around here lately. And ain't you heard MS does not give it's very secure browser away? :)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1306654/posts?page=96#96
I have Firefox open with seven tabs now. Two different Free Republic tabs, four on earthquake/tsunami news and the CIA World Fact Book.
I often start a new window for a new subject. May have one window with FR tabs with clicked links, another window for news and blogs, etc. Helps me to remember where everything is that way. I also am interested in learning how to use the RSS news reader plug in, I have played with it a bit, but not to the point of using RSS news feeds regularly.
I'm now up to nine tabs. (3) FR, (4) earthquake/tsunami, (1) CIA World Fact Book and (1) miscellaneous.
I am reading this on Firefox. It's a nice little browser, and very secure for the time being. The real question is how quickly will Mozilla respond when the spyware starts being written for it?
I would recommend to all users of FF and any browser to use one and only one tab/window when doing banking and other security related activities. Spoofing/phishing and content injection seem to be known vulnerabilities as of now.
http://secunia.com/product/4227/
Get Adblock and look at Spoofstick,Tabbrowser Preferences and Tweak Network Settings extensions too.
As an aside I was a latecomer to the Firefox but after trying it I love it. What made me use it was I got tired of prompts after taming ActiveX and scripting in I.E. although IE is better behaved after SP2.
For the guy interested in RSS, try the Sage extension, it is a light easy to use reader and will get you off the ground, if you don't like it is easy to remove.
http://sage.mozdev.org/
The real question is not how quickly will Mozilla respond...the real question is hopw quickly will users respond when the spyware starts being written for it?
For myself, when the spytware counts start to rise in the scanners (AdAware, etc...) I use, I'll switch to Opera or something else, pronto.
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