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 Microsoft’s 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.
Mozilla’s 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 don’t 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.
So am I the only Netscape user?
I believe firefox arose from the ashes of the netscape code.
You may want to try it out
Firefox is lightweight, highly configurable, and most of all subject to peer code review.
I used to use it, and it was my favorite. But here in Seattle, every company I contracted at used IE as their default browser. I eventually made the switch even though I preferred Netscape.
BTW, Just before I typed this,I successfully accessed my companies intranet with firefox. I'm done with IE.
I am not sure it's all media hype. In Jan 2004, 95% of the visitors to my own web site were using IE as a browser. The percentage of IE users visiting the site now is down around 65%, which prompted me to rewrite a bunch of javascript so that it would work with Firefox.
I too am wondering what the big deal is. Does Microsoft make money off IE? If not, why do you expect them to care. I bet Bill Gates is laughing now that Firefox is doing all the work on browsers he can pull some employees out of the IE room.
It is good for the consumer and the economy when real product competition drives technology advances and product improvements.
Congratulations!
I use Netscape v7.2 on all my machines, with FireFox as a back-up, if needed. Their GUIs are very similar.
BUMP to study later...
I believe most users stopped using Netscape after the AOL deal that left AOL so tied into the Netscape code and limited other development of the browser. That spurred Mozilla, based on the opensource codebase of Netscape. Mozilla is an awsome browser in itself.
Looks like I responded too fast. Normally, if I need to use my work computer to go outside the intranet, the first time I try, I have to enter a password. When I use firefox,it simply says it cannot find the site. There is no password connection.
I can ONLY use firefox at work to access the intranet.
Not so fast. See my post 33.
Kewl jet!
AND what's to stop the "hacker" community from entering the fray? It seems to me if you want total safety, turn off the computer and move to a mountain top.
| I bet Bill Gates is laughing now that Firefox is doing all the work on browsers he can pull some employees out of the IE room.
This is like having the blocking back fall down just as the play gets underway. If Firefox hits 20% share, no one doing business with consumers will dare rely on proprietary features of IE on their web sites. The days of, "it works on IE, screw the Netscape users" are over. Developers will have to test on both. This is a big deal. |
What do you think will happen if Firefox goes from 5% to 20% of market share, and the A-Holes who write and distribute adware, malware, viruses, and security threats now have the incentive to turn their attention from IE to FF?
Maybe this is because Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows really wasn't keeping Netscape from competing. Netscape just wasn't a better product than Explorer.
Now it is, and it's rapidly gaining market share.
Once again, the only ones who really gained from the government intervening in the market were the lawyers.
Entering what fray? People don't just pile on code willy-nilly. Patches and improvements are submitted to a few core people. They test it out and examine the code before entering it into the codebase.
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Not true. Gates used Windows to ram IE onto all the desktops, and he's been trying to use the fact that IE was on all the desktops to ram .NET into the server middleware market... and with it Windows Server and SQL Server.