[opendtv] News: In the Battle of the Browsers '04, Firefox Aims at Microsoft
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 09:47:00 -0500
In the Battle of the Browsers '04, Firefox Aims at Microsoft
By STEVE LOHR and JOHN MARKOFF
Published: November 15, 2004
Does anyone remember the browser wars?
In the rapid-fire pace of the technology business, Microsoft's
successful, though illegal, campaign to thwart competition in the
market for Web browsing software during the 1990's seems to be
ancient history.
The corporate target, Netscape Communications, is all but a memory
today, a tiny unit of Time Warner. And the last thread of the epic
federal antitrust suit - a case focused on the browser market - fell
away last week when a longtime Microsoft foe made peace with its old
adversary.
The Computer and Communications Industry Association said it would
not request a Supreme Court review of the remedies against Microsoft,
which it had believed to be too lenient, and instead would welcome
Microsoft as a member of the trade group.
Yet a few refugees from the original Netscape and a new generation of
software developers believe that browser software - the gateway to
information and commerce on the Internet - still matters.
They are the ones behind the freely available, open-source Firefox
browser, which was officially released last Tuesday, and they are
committed to providing competition in the browser market.
"This is really about taking back the Web and not having to rely on
the technology and technology standards of one company," said Brendan
Eich, a former Netscape engineer who is the chief software architect
of the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit group that has coordinated
the development of Firefox.
Firefox has won praise from some Internet experts for being more
innovative than Microsoft's Internet Explorer and less susceptible to
malicious programs that routinely attack the Microsoft browser.
Firefox, they say, is a compact, free-standing browser designed to
display Web pages rapidly while blocking pop-up ads and other
unsolicited windows. Downloads of the new browser were running at the
rate of a million a day last week.
Before its official release, an estimated eight million people
downloaded a preview version of Firefox over the past five months.
There are other non-Microsoft browsers, like Safari from Apple
Computer and Opera, created by a Norwegian company, Opera Software.
But the early enthusiasm for the preview version of Firefox is a big
reason that Internet Explorer's market share has slipped more than
2.5 percentage points in the last five months, to 92.9 percent at the
end of October, its first decline since 1999, according to
WebSideStory, a firm that tracks Web traffic.
The release of Firefox 1.0 last week could put more pressure on
Microsoft. "Firefox is a real competitor," said David M. Smith, an
analyst at Gartner, a research firm. "Anything that is growing is a
competitor, and it is growing at Microsoft's expense."
The incipient rise of Firefox, some analysts say, points to an
inherent weakness in a fundamental Microsoft business strategy: tying
more and more products and features to its monopoly product, the
Windows operating system. Internet Explorer is tightly bound to
Windows, a move that Microsoft says improves the browser's
performance.
This strategy, the analysts say, means that innovation in much of the
company's software tends to move in lockstep with Windows
development, and that pace has slowed as the operating system has
become larger and increasingly complex.
"Microsoft has not done any fundamental innovation in the browser for
years," said Michael Cusumano, a professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. "It doesn't
surprise me that there are openings for smaller, lighter products
that are separate from the operating system like Mozilla's Firefox."
Firefox also has been given a lift by the security vulnerabilities of
Internet Explorer. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness
Team, a group overseen by the Department of Homeland Security, took
the unusual step last summer of suggesting a switch to browsers other
than Internet Explorer as one way to reduce vulnerability to computer
viruses.
Microsoft's strategy of tightly linking its browser to Windows,
computer security experts say, does not necessarily make Internet
Explorer more vulnerable. But Bruce Schneier, chief technology
officer of Counterpane Internet Security, a security company, said
the added complexity of that design increases the risk of security
flaws.
Microsoft says it is moving ahead with browser development and has a
team of more than 100 programmers working on advances to Internet
Explorer. Security, company executives say, has improved considerably
with the release in August with an update to Windows.
Despite its huge market share, Microsoft has ample motivation to keep
enhancing Internet Explorer, they say. "Browsing the Web is a core
experience," said Gary Share, a director of product management for
Windows. "And if we want people to continue to use Windows, we have
to make sure the browsing experience is as rich and as secure as we
possibly can."
The Firefox development is being led, said Mr. Eich, 43, by a "new
generation of hackers," like Ben Goodger, a 24-year-old native of New
Zealand. Mr. Goodger, the lead engineer on Firefox, is one of the
Mozilla Foundation's full-time staff of 12 people, working from
informal offices in Mountain View, Calif.
Mr. Goodger headed a team of more than 80 mostly volunteer
programmers. His motivation, he said, was mainly the engineer's
satisfaction of crafting tight, coherent code that others can build
on and that is easy for ordinary people to use.
"People really like using software that is polished," he said.
For Mitchell Baker, a former Netscape lawyer and president of the
foundation, the warm reception for Firefox carries a measure of
vindication. "The Mozilla project has been characterized by a level
of relentless, dogged passion," Ms. Baker said.
"We got through the dark days when people thought we were a failure,"
she added, "Now I have a lot of optimism."
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