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.
If Dirty Harry can fly one, I bet we could figure it out...lol
What will happen is that any single piece of mal-ware will not damage as much of the installed user base as it does now. Variety is a good thing.
Because the switch is so easy, so effective and makes their browsing so much better, that users will begin to wonder what other MS software they can think about dumping.
FireFox is excellent. It loads slowly, but once loaded is very fast. It's more secure than IE. Get the adblock and spoofstick extensions and you should be in great shape.
What specific problems are you having? I've had a couple, but one or two have gone away.
Of course that will most likely happen as the bigger you are the bigger target you become. But, with peer code review, (Which Micro$oft does not have), it will most likely be less of an issue.
In any event, I want to use the best product available that fits my needs right now, which in my opinion, is Firefox.
IE can allow access to parts of your operating system that third-party browsers do not
The adblock extension makes the whole thing worth it!
This might allow Uncle Sam (but I doubt anything BIG will come of it) to go after Bill Gates & Microsoft again for forcing a wbe browser to be part of the CORE of the operating system, this is the key reason IE is so vunerable to hacks.
One reason Microsoft might begin to worry if more & more users switch to 3rd party web browers. ADVERTISING & MERCHANDISING. Yes eh browsers are free but what are the bigest headaches in IE ? ? ? POPUPS and what are POPUPS but ADVERTISING. I always thought that MS got a kickback for allowing popups to become so easy to do in IE.
The Mozilla Foundation is a California not-for-profit corporation. Nobody there is concerned with turning a profit - just making a better browser.
Thank God for that! This one of the major issues with IE!
As is the case 100% (almost) of the time, your comment is spot on. I was going to write the same thing myself, but couldn't say it as well. If it weren't so important, then the court battles over the IE integration wouldn't have occurred.
Reading and posting with Firefox BUMP!
Sounds like a proxy using NTLM authentication or Firefox not using the default domain suffix...
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