Internet Explorer Will Never Beat Firefox’s Community
by Wyatt WalterWith today’s release of Internet Explorer 8, there’s been a bit of chatter of how IE seems to have leap-frogged ahead of Firefox. By nature, the browser war will always be this leap-frog game of innovating while implementing other browsers’ innovations to get ahead. However, Microsoft simply doesn’t have the community to maintain a leadership in the feature department.
Even if Microsoft has added some killer new features in IE, within a few months, someone from the Firefox community will build an extension to allow Firefox users to have the same functionality. Of course, the functionality won’t come included with the browser ‘out of the box’, but the functionality exists and users will likely not give up other extensions to migrate to IE. In fact, all of the new features that Microsoft is touting in IE8 are already implemented. You can download an accelerator, web slice-type extension, and grouped tabs extensions for Firefox if those features attract you. An extension for privacy mode in Firefox has existed since 2006, but it just hasn’t been integrated into the Firefox package.
The other thing that Firefox (and any other open source browser) has against IE (or Safari for that matter) is the fact that the community is the driving force behind added features and improvements. Sure, Microsoft listens to their users and tries to accommodate new features, but they’re not end users. A strong bond between end users and developers is key to attracting and keeping users using a piece of software.
As this war wages on, the leap-frogging will continue with IE as it releases major versions adding loads of new features, but Mozilla’s community will continue to deliver those features and others slowly as time goes on. The tortoise usually beats the hare, but in this case there’s thousands of tortoises and a comparatively small number of hares. Time will only tell, but Microsoft still has a huge climb ahead if it wants to be rated as the ‘best’ browser (whatever that means) by any amount of users for very long.
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Tags: firefox, internet explorer, microsoft
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Mar 19th, 2009
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