The Fox Is in Microsoft's Henhouse (and Salivating)

Published on December 19, 2004 By Black Xero In WinCustomize News

FIREFOX is a classic overnight success, many years in the making.

Published by the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit group supporting open-source software that draws upon the skills of hundreds of volunteer programmers, Firefox is a Web browser that is fast and filled with features that Microsoft's stodgy Internet Explorer lacks. Firefox installs in a snap, and it's free.

Firefox 1.0 was released on Nov. 9. Just over a month later, the foundation celebrated a remarkable milestone: 10 million downloads. Donations from Firefox's appreciative fans paid for a two-page advertisement in The New York Times on Thursday.

Until now, the Linux operating system was the best-known success among the hundreds of open-source projects that challenge Microsoft with technically strong, free software that improves as the population of bug-reporting and bug-fixing users grows. But unless you oversee purchases for a corporate data center, it's unlikely that you've felt the need to try Linux yourself.

With Firefox, open-source software moves from back-office obscurity to your home, and to your parents', too. (Your children in college are already using it.) It is polished, as easy to use as Internet Explorer and, most compelling, much better defended against viruses, worms and snoops.

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For the first time, Internet Explorer has been losing market share. According to a worldwide survey conducted in late November by OneStat.com, a company in Amsterdam that analyzes the Web, Internet Explorer's share dropped to less than 89 percent, 5 percentage points less than in May. Firefox now has almost 5 percent of the market, and it is growing.

Read detailed article from New York Times at Link

Comments (Page 5)

dukeofchutney

on Dec 22, 2004

Well that's the 2nd collegue whose cracked under the strain and switched to Firefox...11 more to go...

paxx

on Dec 22, 2004

Of course, there is the CSS question and the JScript one where Microsoft implemented it's own instead of using industry standards, but that's not what I was refering to. Just for straight HTML, things won't display the same sometimes in IE and other browsers because IE lets you do mistakes while other browsers don't. You can forget the close a tag in Explorer. You can forget a TD in a table. You can write lazy and sloppy code and IE will still work, while other browsers won't.

And you're wrong. If I have a client using Firefox for example and his web site looks like crap in it, he won't blame Firefox, he will blame me (the web developper). If anybody using Firefox goes to a web site and the site doesn't work right, they won't blame Firefox, they will blame the site developpers. I do, most Forefox users I know do too. Because they IS a way to make it look right for both. Unless you're relying on Active X of course, but I've never liked the idea of Active X anyway.

As far as IE integration goes. Type C:\ in the address bar of Explorer. Now do the same in Firefox or any other browser. 'Nuff said.

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