Posted on 12/22/2004 8:32:38 AM PST by holymoly
Remember those days back in 1995, when Netscape Navigator was synonymous with internet? That was the time when Microsofts Internet Explorer entered the market for a head-on collision with the Netscape Navigator. That was Browser War I. Now the battle was reignited by the fire of FireFox, internet browser of Mozilla. This is the beginning of the Browser War II. And it appears that this time Microsoft is losing it.
Internet Explorer is rapidly losing market share. OneStat.com a company in Amsterdam had conducted a worldwide survey in late November. The survey shows that 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.
Net surfers are opting for FireFox to Internet Explorer due to security concerns. FireFox offers much more security from worms and viruses than IE. FireFox 1.0 was released for free on the web on Nov. 9. Within just one month 10 million copies of the browser were downloaded. It is an open source software which improves with time as bug-reporter and bug-fixer community grows.
Mozillas President Mitchell Baker is optimistic that FireFox will grab 10 percent market share and Mozilla's many technology parts will become an increasingly important application development platform.
She says that the product is so nice that people love it when they try it. It is innovative and has new features, it makes the Web a more enjoyable experience, it makes people more comfortable, and it's fast. It's a set of things you would want in a browser if you sat down and really thought about it. She added that people rarely realize that the quality your web experience is determined to a large extent by the kind of browser you use. Firefox gives them that wonderful browsing enjoyment.
Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows on the other hand feels that people will stick with IE when they consider all the things that made them to opt for IE in the first place. He said that Microsoft is developing a new version of browser but one will have to wait till 2006. Schare said that Microsoft goes to people and gets there feedback on what they want and what they dont want in a product. It is not so easy to satisfy absolutely everyone.
To us however somehow the diminishing share of IE from the market says something else. It says that nowadays costumers have a new way of giving a feedback. They just switch to someone else.
Im as free market as they come, but I dont believe that the Complaint Department should be done away with. Far too many people have accepted too much from bad business practices.
If we already got your money, press 1 now. If you really and truly think we give a damn about your problems, press 2 .
If you plan to view PDF files, download Adobe Acrobat 7.0. Earlier versions don't work well with Firefox. I tried a couple of cluges, but they didn't work right.
That has to simply be the most moronic post of the year.
It only works with 2000 and XP. 9x users will be stuck with the 6 series, it appears.
I just don't understand them - supporting free market does not mean you will have to automatically support every company, whether it be American Airlines, Time Warner, Microsoft, Kirby's, Fonterra, BMW, Alstom.
respectfully disagree. I run XP pro and XP home on sony laptops and have no problems with Mozilla. Your bugs might be from some other source or incompatability.
You beat me by almost 6 hours.
I only use IE for Windows updates...and that is only because Microsoft forces me too.
Other than that, Firefox all the way.
Danke Grunt!
set the homepage to News.Google.com and you get the world each time you log on
JoJo,
Knoppix is a good choice for starts. It recognizes most hardware with no problems, and there is a cheatcodes file to get over the humps. Believe Klaus Knopper still runs a web site with a fairly comprehensive forum. Before I went broadband, I started a download at bedtime and if there were no glitches, completed in the AM. If your are interested, the Linux documentation project www.tldp.org has a long list of HOWTOs and other documentation.
Mel
Okay, so Im using Mozilla as my primary browser. Big deal. I still see some ads. My computer is still plugged into the wall, and the bill will come due at the end of the month from both the power company and the ISP, which means open source wont starve out the techs and pole climbers and secretaries and postal workers, nor the bankers or grocers or Wal-Mart employees or gas station owners or broadcasters or butchers and bakers and candlestick makers who feed off of them, etc.
Im using open source products on an HP machine via a Microsoft OS. Im writing this offline at the moment on an MS word processor. Seems a fair balance to me.
Certainly some of the Mozilla coders have a deep hatred, or distrust, towards MS, and its why they do what they do. But there are others who do it for the hobby, for the fun of working on a large project. Where is creativity stifled?
I think of a woman I used to be with, who was very good at arts and crafts, how she made things and gave them to her friends for the love of doing it, and she paid good money to the craft stores in the process.
Communism, my rusty behind
.
Have mercy. It's now at 700 megs, a maxed out CD for sure. It'd take forever to download and I'd bet my last money it'd have errors.
http://www.knoppix.net/
Yep, wholeheartedly. It works almost identically, and is substantially more secure. And you still leave IE in place, in case you need it for some oddball site.
If you are on a high-speed connections, there are a couple of easy tweaks that substantially speed Firefox. Go here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1299854/posts
I have some general comments
1. Windows XP SP2 comes with a pop up blocker. I haven't gotten IE pop ups since I installed SP2 RC1 early this year.
2. If you run XP, install SP2 for that and 1000 other reasons
2a, If you run Windows but not XP. Get XP SP2 or unplug / physically protect / your machine from the internet.
3. The IE browser has no there there. MS has HTML rendering component that is a service of Windows (thus the so-called integration) that they combine with other user interface elements and packaged them all together into somethign called IE.
Anyone right now can take the IE HTML renderer AxSHDocVw.DLL and using any COM or .Net development technology can make their own tabbed browser. AOL uses the MS HTML renderer to construct its built in web browser (at the time AOL bought Netscape, the Netscape code was such a mess that AOL couldnt' even integrate it into the AOL software. The MS component plugged right in.)
IE pre-XP SP2 is a security risk without a doubt.
My thoughts exactly. Browsers are free!!!!!!!!
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