The New York Times
November 15, 2004
In the Battle of the Browsers '04, Firefox Aims at Microsoft
By STEVE LOHR and JOHN MARKOFF
Does anyone remember the browser wars?
In the rapid-fire pace of the technology business, Microsoft's successful, though illegal, campaign to thwart competition in the market for Web browsing software during the 1990's seems to be ancient history.
The corporate target, Netscape Communications, is all but a memory today, a tiny unit of Time Warner. And the last thread of the epic federal antitrust suit - a case focused on the browser market - fell away last week when a longtime Microsoft foe made peace with its old adversary.
The Computer and Communications Industry Association said it would not request a Supreme Court review of the remedies against Microsoft, which it had believed to be too lenient, and instead would welcome Microsoft as a member of the trade group.
Yet a few refugees from the original Netscape and a new generation of software developers believe that browser software - the gateway to information and commerce on the Internet - still matters.
They are the ones behind the freely available, open-source Firefox browser, which was officially released last Tuesday, and they are committed to providing competition in the browser market.
"This is really about taking back the Web and not having to rely on the technology and technology standards of one company," said Brendan Eich, a former Netscape engineer who is the chief software architect of the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit group that has coordinated the development of Firefox.
Firefox has won praise from some Internet experts for being more innovative than Microsoft's Internet Explorer and less susceptible to malicious programs that routinely attack the Microsoft browser.
Firefox, they say, is a compact, free-standing browser designed to display Web pages rapidly while blocking pop-up ads and other unsolicited windows. Downloads of the new browser were running at the rate of a million a day last week.
Before its official release, an estimated eight million people downloaded a preview version of Firefox over the past five months.
There are other non-Microsoft browsers, like Safari from Apple Computer and Opera, created by a Norwegian company, Opera Software. But the early enthusiasm for the preview version of Firefox is a big reason that Internet Explorer's market share has slipped more than 2.5 percentage points in the last five months, to 92.9 percent at the end of October, its first decline since 1999, according to WebSideStory, a firm that tracks Web traffic.
The release of Firefox 1.0 last week could put more pressure on Microsoft. "Firefox is a real competitor," said David M. Smith, an analyst at Gartner, a research firm. "Anything that is growing is a competitor, and it is growing at Microsoft's expense."
The incipient rise of Firefox, some analysts say, points to an inherent weakness in a fundamental Microsoft business strategy: tying more and more products and features to its monopoly product, the Windows operating system. Internet Explorer is tightly bound to Windows, a move that Microsoft says improves the browser's performance.
This strategy, the analysts say, means that innovation in much of the company's software tends to move in lockstep with Windows development, and that pace has slowed as the operating system has become larger and increasingly complex.
"Microsoft has not done any fundamental innovation in the browser for years," said Michael Cusumano, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. "It doesn't surprise me that there are openings for smaller, lighter products that are separate from the operating system like Mozilla's Firefox."
Firefox also has been given a lift by the security vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a group overseen by the Department of Homeland Security, took the unusual step last summer of suggesting a switch to browsers other than Internet Explorer as one way to reduce vulnerability to computer viruses.
Microsoft's strategy of tightly linking its browser to Windows, computer security experts say, does not necessarily make Internet Explorer more vulnerable. But Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security, a security company, said the added complexity of that design increases the risk of security flaws.
Microsoft says it is moving ahead with browser development and has a team of more than 100 programmers working on advances to Internet Explorer. Security, company executives say, has improved considerably with the release in August with an update to Windows.
Despite its huge market share, Microsoft has ample motivation to keep enhancing Internet Explorer, they say. "Browsing the Web is a core experience," said Gary Share, a director of product management for Windows. "And if we want people to continue to use Windows, we have to make sure the browsing experience is as rich and as secure as we possibly can."
The Firefox development is being led, said Mr. Eich, 43, by a "new generation of hackers," like Ben Goodger, a 24-year-old native of New Zealand. Mr. Goodger, the lead engineer on Firefox, is one of the Mozilla Foundation's full-time staff of 12 people, working from informal offices in Mountain View, Calif.
Mr. Goodger headed a team of more than 80 mostly volunteer programmers. His motivation, he said, was mainly the engineer's satisfaction of crafting tight, coherent code that others can build on and that is easy for ordinary people to use.
"People really like using software that is polished," he said.
For Mitchell Baker, a former Netscape lawyer and president of the foundation, the warm reception for Firefox carries a measure of vindication. "The Mozilla project has been characterized by a level of relentless, dogged passion," Ms. Baker said.
"We got through the dark days when people thought we were a failure," she added, "Now I have a lot of optimism."
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