Posted on 10/27/2004 10:31:15 PM PDT by budman_2001
Blake Ross is lounging at his parents' Florida Keys condo, thinking ahead to his first day back at Stanford. His goal for his sophomore year: nothing less than to "take back the Web" from Microsoft (MSFT).
You might think the shy 19-year-old is outmatched. Think again. Ross, a software prodigy who interned at Netscape at age 14, is the lead architect behind Mozilla's Firefox -- a revolutionary new browser that's catching on the way Mosaic did in 1993. In beta for the past four months, Firefox version 1.0 is set to be released in November. With that, Ross will issue the first truly formidable challenge to Internet Explorer that the world has seen in seven years.
"We're hoping for 10 million downloads in 10 days," Ross says proudly.
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,714129,00.html
my part time job can only be used through IE but for everything else its firefox, even though its still quite glitchy in some instances.
The website I run has seen IE fall from over 90% to 65% in the last 6 months. People just plain don't trust using IE anymore - it is just a time waster to use it.
If it is free, that sounds like a bad business model
First it was the Clinton government after them, trying to take them down, then it was the EU, large fine - now this guy -
I wonder how the one man is feeling about all this
Other than that, its great.
Fast, tweakable, tons of special extensions and great themes.
Highest level of HTML/CSS standards, except when it comes to Flash. There, I also have some problems (www.speedtv.com)
using FF 1.0 right now.
No, I have not.
Now, however, and for the past week or so, it's Firefox all the way, baby!
They'll make it up volume. /sarc
What extensions do you like?
There's a guy in West Virginia by the name of Warren Woodford. He's a one man inventor who reinvented desktop Linux by putting it on a CD you can run and if you want to, install it to your hard drive. He said he was dissatisfied with how every other distro worked and invented his own. Its based on Debian Linux and for $10, it beats the pants off Microsoft and heavily advertised rivals like Linspire and Xandros. Check it out at http://www.mepis.org
That's what they said about crack cocaine didn't they ?
Sometimes Javascripting fails, quite miserably I might add. Sometimes it interferes with other programs, like my internet poker and just odd little things like autoscrolling getting stuck and not registering clicks on some things. I am pretty sure its not my computer because all of the above work pefectly well in IE.
How does destroying Microsoft hurt conservatives?
I thought we were always for big business and the free market...
I mean... help conservatives... how does it help us?
Just started using Firefox. I'm tired of all of the spyware and Trojan alerts.
I'm for competition. You can basically pick up a barebones computer from Fry's, buy a $10 Mephis CD, install all the Operating System and all the apps from the CD you think you'll need and you're in business. And if you think you need more, there are free Debian repositories on the Web. Competition's healthy for Microsoft in giving every one better quality software at a more affordable price.
Time will tell.
As for business models, its a pretty non-standard plan. Hopefully, his parents will be large shareholders when it goes public. :-))
But, long term seriously, there is a possible subscriber base, along with a corporate support base, that can be squeezed slowly, BUT ONLY with excellent product and service.
A tall order, but possible. And lucritive, considering MS IE's security strategy of whack-a-mole that has CIOs feeling like they are chasin' their tails.
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