Mozilla: breaking up the monopoly
In five months since Mozilla released the first public version of their open-source alternative to Internet Explorer, Firefox has slowly taken a large bite out of Microsoft's browser monopoly. Since the fourth iteration of Internet Explorer (IE4), Microsoft has all but controlled—at its height, Internet Explorer claimed upwards from 95% of all Internet-enabled machines—access to the world wide web. In recent months, however, their hold has shifted and, much to the surprise of the tech industry, Microsoft has been unable to fight back.
For the casual observer, Firefox's progress might not appear that impressive, but keep in mind the amazing uphill battle that Mozilla has been fighting. At approximately 20% of the market, Firefox now holds a significant portion of the browsing public—so what exactly is the whole ordeal about, anyways?
In the beginning of what we know was the Internet—the world wide web, specifically—there were half a dozen Internet browsers of merit. Eventually the competition narrowed down to two, Netscape and Internet Explorer, culminating with the demise of the former and the victory of the latter in the late nineties. Since then, there have been numerous attempts to renew the battle—Netscape's final breath, with Netscape 7, failed in 2002; open-source Opera has been on the market since before the millennium rolled over.
The competition over the browser market eventually died down. Microsoft released a much-improved version of their browser, IE6, which made progress in strides compared to Windows XP over its Windows ME and 98 predecessors—that is, a bundle of them. The browser was faster, smaller and finally began to support web standards that other, smaller browsers (such as Mozilla and Opera) had long obeyed.
The problem for Internet Explorer's competitors has always been distribution. All versions of Windows ship, by default, with Internet Explorer preinstalled. While lawsuits finally made it possible to uninstall the browser, the majority of the population preferred to take the easy road and use the software that came with their computer. After all, the average user could not tell the difference between Internet Explorer and any other browser; they just want to access the Internet, they don't care how.
With the onslaught of spyware, pop-up ads and other nasty annoyances picking up popularity in recent years, however, the general populace began to demand solutions. Google's popular search toolbar presented one solution, but it was unable to stop the torrent of spyware and other malware applications from installing themselves. In early 2002, Mozilla finally had the chance to make their move.
Long developed as an open-source program (think of open-source as analogous to non-profit organizations, they don't exist purely for commercial reasons), Mozilla began trimming down Firebird—the original manifestation of Firefox—and came up with a workable test version in 2002. A year later, Mozilla had finally come up with an alternative to Internet Explorer: it was faster, smaller, had more features (including a built-in search bar and tabbed browsing) and, best of all, it stopped pop-ups and was susceptible to spyware attacks.
Current statistics, according to industry-standard UpsDell, show Internet Explorer with a sizable advantage with a range of 81- 67% of the market; in comparison, Firefox claims anywhere from 9-21% of the remaining population. While these numbers might appear lopsided towards Microsoft, the reality is obvious when faced with the same statistics from January 2002: Internet Explorer held 85-90%, while no other non-IE browser recorded more than a maximum of 4%.
Debate still exists on the viability of Firefox—is it more secure by nature, or is it more secure due to lack of attempts to break through?—and Internet Explorer is by no means a non-factor. It is still to be seen how Microsoft will respond to Firefox, for as of yet they're only reaction has been to continue periodic security updates to their software. One thing, however, is certain: The days of a browser monopoly are over and, at least as a web developer, I will gladly smile at that.