Posts Tagged ‘firefox’

Internet Explorer Will Never Beat Firefox’s Community

With 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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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Mar 19th, 2009

Mozilla Doesn’t Want Firefox to Be Bundled With Windows

Firefox architect, Mike Connor has come out and said that Mozilla simply doesn’t want Firefox to be bundled with Windows. The European Union has been throwing around ideas on what to do with Microsoft since it found Microsoft guilty of anti-competitive practices by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. The problem for Mozilla lies in the fact that, should this happen, Firefox would become everything that they are trying to fight: a monopoly.

The open source software maker gives away its browser for free, but it’s a different type of freedom that Mozilla is chasing. “Free software” is about freedom of choice which is not accomplished by forming a monopoly and forcing everyone to use a free (as in price) product. It doesn’t accomplish what the Mozilla Foundation (and other open source foundations) are about.

Firefox doesn’t really need to be concerned yet with only a 20% market share, but as users are presented with a choice, they often are choosing Firefox. Connor says that he wants Firefox to be used out of choice, not because it was what came with the operating system: “As people become aware there’s an alternative, you don’t end up in that situation. You have to be perceptibly better.”

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Feb 10th, 2009

Mozilla Boasts 20% Market Share

Mozilla is boasting in their blog that 20% of users browsing the web are using Firefox. According to the Net Applications study, Firefox was at 20% usage for two weeks in October. According to crn.com, Internet Explorer usage was down almost 5%, from 76.04% to 71.27%. Safari usage increased about one percentage point as well going from 5.59% up to 6.57%.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Nov 3rd, 2008