Posted on 01/04/2005 4:26:26 PM PST by Coleus
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Is this internet prodigy about to knock Microsoft off its pedestal? A Miami teenager has created a free web browser that has been called Bill Gates's worst nightmare |
A MIAMI teenager is basking in the glory of helping to create a new internet browser at 17 that is now challenging the grip of Microsoft, which once held a virtual monopoly on web surfing.
Computer analysts say that Blake Ross’s browser, Firefox, is a faster, more versatile program that also offers better protection from viruses and unwanted advertising.
Industry experts have dubbed the new software “Microsoft’s worst nightmare”, according to the technology magazine Business 2.0. It hailed Mr Ross, now 19, as a software prodigy. He is also a talented pianist and “an unbelievable creative writer”, according to his mother, Ross. “Anything he does, he does well,” she said.
As a seven-year-old Mr Ross became hooked on the popular computer game SimCity, designing and budgeting his own virtual city. By 10, he had created his own website. He later created his own computer applications and online text games.Soon he was reporting computer software flaws to manufacturers online.
At 14 he was offered an internship at Netscape in Silicon Valley. His mother drove him out to California for three summers in succession.
At Netscape, Mr Ross was introduced to the Mozilla Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that promotes “choice and innovation on the web”.
Mozilla was already trying to develop an open-source alternative browser to Microsoft’s Explorer, which many analysts felt had grown clumsy and outdated. Mr Ross and his friend David Hyatt began working on a small, user-focused browser. What began as an experimental side-project turned into Firefox.
Mr Ross is quick to point out that he was one of a large team at Mozilla who worked on the project for five years. “It’s a big volunteer effort,” he said. In fact, the pair left before the work was completed, but Mozilla credits them with making the breakthrough. After he left to go to university, Mr Ross continued to be a “significant contributor”, according to Mozilla.
The task involved throwing out all the old codes and rewriting the entire system so it would support all websites on the internet. While Firefox still has a long way to go to rival Microsoft, it seems to be catching on. Firefox has received dazzling reviews from industry analysts. Recently some 10,000 Firefox fans raised $250,000 (£131,000) to take out a two-page advertisement in The New York Times. It is not just in dividual users who are taking interest. In December, the information technology department at Pennsylvania State University sent a note to college deans recommending that the entire 100,000-strong staff, faculty and student body switch to Firefox.
Mr Ross, now a student at Stanford University studying computer science, is taking it all in his stride. As a volunteer on an open-source product, there was no financial reward.
Microsoft professes to be unfazed. Windows executive Gary Schare said: “We’re seeing the natural ebb and flow of a competitive marketplace with new products being introduced. It’s not surprising to see curious early adopters checking them out.”
Not content with making a huge dent in Microsoft’s browser share, Mozilla, the foundation behind Firefox, is also going after Microsoft’s Outlook and other e-mail packages.
Called Thunderbird 1.0, the package works on Windows, Macintosh and Linux and has been praised by the industry and press for finally offering a challenge to Microsoft’s dominance in the e-mail arena.
The software provides a number of features which other packages are struggling to offer. Key features include e-mail junk filters that analyse and sort incoming mail and greater security elements.
Edgewood, Washington
Eh. I downloaded firefox, and didn't really see any improvement over Netscape, unless you consider freezing up everytime I tried to download a file an improvement.
Thanks for the heads up, I won't download it then.
Were you able to delete it and unfreeze everything?
Well my statement was responding to somebody that said IE = Windows.
See, that's where you misunderstand. I've been in the business since about 79. I was a teen in 79, but got a job feeding punch cards on weekends. See my FR profile if you wish to be nauseated. I personally support everything and I have a mandrake box here at the house.
I too started my computer career in 1979 - working for Wang Labs - I was 19.I did field support of Minicomputers which included cool stuff like replacing heads and platters in hard drives (monsters the size of washing machines with platters bigger than Frisbees) – ah, the good old days when I carried around an oscilloscope and computers were big and in rooms with elevated floors and glass doors and guys in white lab coats.
I don't hate Microsoft. I do however have a userbase that I and my staff support. I'm moving them over to Firefox for general browsing and only IE when absolutely necessary. At some point in early/mid 2003, we were fighting spyware so much that it was taking 50% of the time of my staff to fix it. I got some of the heavy users(Researchers and fact finders) to switch to Firebird(beta .7 of what became Firefox). The problems evaporated. I now know how to clean just about everthing and how to lock down a machine. Back then, even trusted zones would get spyware sites added.
I have tons of problems with Sypware at home - but we have no real problems at work. I guess your company always "free range" browsing at work. Nevertheless, what you did sounds smart.
At this point in time, anyone in the business cannot possible suggest people use Internet Explorer unless absolutely required.
My company (not mine personally, the one I work for) has tens of thousands of customers with hundreds of products and all we support is IE.
No matter how hard they try, malware authors will never be able to cause the havoc to FF as they do to IE.
Now that statement is complete nonsense. FireFox has been around for about a month or two and they have already found a serious vulnerability.
Well, I never saw them, but I will need to investigate. I just downloaded Firefox on my computer at work, and there were no offending bookmarks. Probably something specific to my laptop at home, and not endemic to Firefox. I'll check it when I get home.
Not true. Firefox has been around for as Beta's for at least a year. I think I first installed Firebird Circa Oct 2003.
The issue is the IE can run in the Local zone. Compromise a module in IE, quite often you've compromised windows. The same cannot be said for Firefox. I'm not saying it's immune. By it's nature however it's more secure by default.
As to vulns in Firefox, there were a number that hit in the beta. The one you're referring to is a Phishing Vuln. Using Spoofstick would alert you to the issue. The other is that you have to go to a site and download some Malware.
This is quite a different issue than IE where the Malware folks just crossscript a site, download the Malware in the background for you and you havn't a clue anything happened at all. Orders of magnitude in difference.
Duh!
Simple, people have to avoid various cool CSS features because IE can't handle them. Thus, most web design is dumbed-down.
Everything I mentioned lets me access my content more quickly and efficiently. I like that.
Are you really that thick?
You really are that thick. There's more to reading than looking at words. Comprehension is very important, too.
If you dispute that statement, I'm absolutely certain you don't, or at least you don't pay much attention. It's mainly developers who are hounding Microsoft to update their browser -- the mass public couldn't care less.
You certainly would never be hired at my company - we hire software engineers, not browser evangelicals.
I'm not sure I'd want to work at a company so out of touch with reality. I don't evangelize a browser, I evangelize standards -- something Microsoft has a problem with when they don't own them.
I am guessing you are a high school or college student who has never been in the real world of the computer industry (like I said, just a guess)
Bad guess. I've been developing professionally for the Web for 10 years, when the WWW was in its infancy. I went through the race between Netscape and IE, each inventing its own tags with each new version, Microsoft screwing with DLLs so that installing IE would kill Netscape (bad when you're a developer testing for browser compatibility). W3C standards were what all of us developers were hoping for, a way to write once knowing it would display on all browsers. 10 years later and MS still hasn't gotten the idea.
Then it's settled. By your definition, IE is not a standard.
I wanted to thank you again for your help and let you know I was finally successful with Firefox, which I am now using. Very cool.
Nobody should assume, just to make it clear, that you've been visiting salacious websites when using IE - it's entirely possible that some website you visited surreptitiously placed those bookmarks in IE without you even knowing about it.
Sorry I've been absent from this lively discussion.
I never claimed Word didn't read or write other formats. I'm arguing that the MS goal was to prevent others from reading their files, not the other way around. But, they didn't publish the specs for the file formats so they weren't really standards. Competitors had to reverse-engineer them. Of course, the competitors didn't publish the specs either. My point was that that was the old business model and it's breaking down.
I also never claimed that WordPerfect or other competitors didn't have the same business model of having a file format war. I thought what I was saying was well understood and accepted by most of us old enough to remember the history.
You remember the history, I know, because in another post you stated: Content is not encoded in their proprietary format. That was the desktop model and that is so "ten years ago".
But all this was said better in post 51 by beef and in post 103 by general_re.
I think the Internet screwed over that business model. The Internet is based on published standards that MS didn't control. Their attempt to control it failed. IE was a part of that attempt. Even if MS owned the standards, they would be in trouble because true standards have to have published specs. Very foreign to MS and other old-line companies.
You also said elsewhere: If somebody makes a browser that can deliver the same content IE can deliver - Microsoft does not care. They sell the tools to create and deliver content, not the browser.
So explain why Adobe gives Acrobat Reader away for free but charges for the full version of Acrobat, used to make content? I think it's because they have been able to pull off the business model in this small niche that MS wanted to pull off for the whole Internet.
Content is king - Microsoft knows this. The browser is merely a delivery device for content. People pay for content, not the browser.
Except for my online newspaper, I don't pay for content usually. Most of the content is free. So if MS makes money on tools to create content, and if those tools are based on published standards, do they have a competitive advantage over anyone else? Do they have a better Acrobat, a better Dreamweaver? No, what they have, I think, but I'm no expert, is a set of technologies unique to them, like Active Server Pages and other things that only run on Windows Server 200x.
My ISP has been running MS server technologies from the beginning. Recently, the MS license fees have sky-rocketed and are are killing them but they can't change now to PHP and MySQL or some competing commercial products because all of their customer web sites are based on MS Server technologies only.
Sounds to me as if the more things change the more they stay the same. But I was only trying to explain what I thought others were saying and I, obviously, haven't done a better job then anyone else here.
I was able to ctrl-alt-delete out of the program.
It didn't do any real harm to my computer, it just locked up.
My claim is: IE is Microsoft's analog to Acrobat Reader, Real Player, Flash plugins etc. etc. etc. And MS Server and other tools are the other side of the equation, the same old proprietary, ie secret, equation. But it ain't working so well as it used to.
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