"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….
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.
Microsoft has always viewed Internet Explorer’s tight integration with Windows to be an attractive feature. That, however, was before security became the unmet need of the day. Firefox sits lightly on top of Windows, in a separation from the underlying operating system that the Mozilla Foundation’s president, Mitchell Baker, calls a ‘natural defense.’
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….
How fitting that Microsoft finds itself in this predicament. In late 1995, at a time when Netscape Navigator was synonymous with the Web and Internet Explorer had yet to attract many adopters, Microsoft made a risky but strategically wise decision to redesign the Internet Explorer code from the bottom up - re-architecting, in industry jargon. As Michael A. Cusumano of M.I.T. and David B. Yoffie of Harvard chronicled in their 1998 book, ‘Competing on Internet Time: Lessons From Netscape and Its Battle With Microsoft,’ that decision meant delaying the release of Internet Explorer 3.0, but the resulting product was technically far superior to Netscape’s Navigator. In Browser Wars I, the better browser won.
Today, it’s the Internet Explorer code that is long overdue for a top-to-bottom redesign, one that would treat security as integral, and Firefox is the challenger with new, clean code. Netscape bequeathed its software to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which used an open-source approach to undertake a complete rewrite that took three years. Firefox is built upon the Mozilla base."
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