This fox is doing the chasing
This fox is doing the chasing
Sep 13, 2005: Rodney Appleyard examines why Firefox seems to be catching the imagination of so many Internet users and asks whether Microsoft's Internet Explorer is strong enough to maintain pole position and arrest Firefox's dramatic gains on the world's desktops
Some people would rather settle for life just the way it has always have been, because they feel safer that way. But for others, life is about taking risks and trying something new and exciting that could make our lives better. Firefox has tapped into this adventurous streak, with resounding success.
The rise in the popularity of Firefox has being nothing short of meteoric, racking up its 50 millionth user in May 2005, just six months after it debuted. Created by the Mozilla Foundation, one of its developers, Blake Ross, was ecstatic on the day that it hit its 50 million user landmark. He wrote this for Firefox supporters.
"They said browsers were dead. They said open source would never penetrate the mainstream. But you've never cared much for rules, have you? As we turn open source into a household word and reassert the supremacy of simplicity, we are making waves - and starting fires."
The traction gained by Firefox 1.0 in such a short space of time has prompted the software giant Microsoft to take the unprecedented step of announcing that it will issue an update to its IE browser ahead of the next version of Windows, rather than bundling it together with the application.
Firefox's progress has been aided considerably by an organisation called Spread Firefox, a volunteer advocacy group which has been promoting the browser around the world, and whose membership has now swelled to more than 70,000.
Mitchell Baker, president of the Mozilla Foundation, says: "Firefox is being rapidly adopted by the mainstream, with this audience embracing Firefox as a more user-friendly web browsing solution."
Mozilla Foundation volunteers have even translated the software into 28 different languages, ensuring consumers around the world have equal access to the Firefox browser.
So impressed has IBM been with the open source Web browser that it has encouraged its employees to use Firefox in preference to Internet Explorer.IBM now trains its help-desk staff on Firefox and makes sure that internal applications work with the browser. Big Blue believes that the cost will be much cheaper than IE because it will be able to use open-source additions to Firefox.
Some of the main reasons why a company such as IBM has chosen to use Firefox instead of I.E. is because of the perception that Firefox is far more secure, robust and has more functions to offer than I.E.
However, Microsoft executives do not see Firefox as a threat to I.E. and they refuse to accept that it is less secure or functional. They believe that I.E. has enough functions to satisfy its customers, and there are even features which users never activate, so they doubt whether Firefox's extra options are actually that useful.
Martin Gregory, the platform strategy manager, for Microsoft Australia, says that a survey conducted by Wipro, which involved 90 organisations that use both Windows and open-source software, was carried out to determine the costs of patching both environments under similar conditions.
Gregory says that the results were in favour of Microsoft. "The annual costs of patching the security vulnerabilities of individual Windows-based and similar OSS-based systems are roughly comparable.
"On a per-patching event basis, Windows-based systems require less effort than similar OSS systems. OSS-based systems faced with high-level and critical vulnerabilities are at risk longer than comparable Windows systems. And using patch-related best practices can reduce patching costs for both Windows and OSS systems."
But Gregory does accept that users choose browsers for different reasons and believes that I.E. and Firefox can live in harmony with each other.
However, Jonathan Oxer, the president of Linux Australia, strongly disagrees with the findings of Wipro.
He says that Firefox is not only more secure, but it also meets many more standards than I.E. does, which he believes makes it more appealing to the business place.
"Firefox is far more compliant with the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These standards were developed so that browsing could be predictable. Firefox offers more flexibility because it can read many more types of code than I.E., and it is capable of rendering more websites. For example, Firefox supports the .png format, which is a replacement for .gif and is actually better than a .gif because it can contain more colours.
"I.E., however, has not been updated for so long that it is unable to read this format. It was last updated four years ago, so it is very backward in terms of what it can read compared to Firefox."
Other advantages he listed included Firefox's ability to dynamically refresh pages, without loading a whole new page. Oxer says that many of the features on Firefox have forced Microsoft to speed up its rolling out of I.E.7, because Firefox has initiated more competition.
Gregory retaliated by stating that all that matters is that I.E. 7 will be more advanced and secure than previous I.E. browsers.
Oxer says that one of the great things about Firefox, which he believes a new version of I.E. cannot match, is its ability to be customised. "For instance, it can be used as a web development tool for web validation, and additional web development features can be added to the browser too. It can even be used as a text editor and can be transformed into many different kinds of desktop applications. The look and feel of the browser can even be changed to make it look nicer and work more simply."
Oxer believes that the future of Firefox is even more exciting. Despite Gregory saying that I.E. and Firefox can live comfortably together, Oxer can see Firefox having many more distinctive advantage for business users as time marches on.
"We are going to see much more use of Ajax technology, using JavaScript, that will mean that web pages will be created more dynamically and will work more like desktop applications. Eventually, programmers should be able to write any programme for use on the browser, instead of caring about what kind of operating system is being used.
"This will be a huge threat to Microsoft, and will mean that people will be able to start a project at work on an application, close it down, log onto that same application when they get home and carry on from where they left off. Broadband will help this become possible too."
Assessing the whole situation as it currently stands, Ian Birks, the chief executive officer of analyst company Ideas International, reflected on the battle between I.E. and Firefox.
"I do note that IBM recently came out and backed Firefox for global in-house IBM usage, which is a good indication that Firefox is now becoming a serious mainstream alternative to the Microsoft browser technology.
"I think, however, that Firefox will have to do more than this to significantly challenge Microsoft's market share stranglehold on the browser segment. They are going to have to come up with some kind of disruptive advantage, such as a distinct functionality improvement over I.E. or a go-to-market bundling strategy that opens up new markets for them."
Maybe Oxer's prediction of Firefox being used more as a browser that can run desktop applications with ease could be the way forward that Firefox should follow to make this significant impact on the market that Birks is talking about. It seems inevitable that such an offering will be irresistible for business users. If this happens, Microsoft will undoubtedly fight back with new functionality of its own too, which means the war between the two has only just started and can only get more interesting from here on in.
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