Raiden's Realm: Musing about Firefox and the death of IE

Musing about Firefox and the death of IE (Page 1 of 1)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Jun 26, 2009 at 01:14pm
Section: Editorials
Printer Friendly Version
Legacy URL

I've been reading a lot of commentary lately on the soon to be released Firefox 3.5, and the death of the “disease” known as IE, aka Internet Explorer. Firefox is already gaining huge amounts of market share, and if rumor is to be believed, 3.5 will take even more.

And how has this wonderful rise from nothingness as an insignificant spawn of the Mozilla browser become one of the world's most favorite browsers? Well, I can think of a couple of things. The first is that the Firefox developers actually care about their users. They listen to requests for features, they promptly fix bugs, and they work hard to ensure that everything runs right. And so far they've done a bangup job of that.

Microsoft on the other hand only cares about it's bottom line. If there's one rule of business I've learned, it's this. Take care of the customer first, then your employees, and everything else will take care of itself. And I have yet to see that fail.

Companies that focus on the bottom line at the expense of customers and employees might succeed for a time, but in the end, that misbalanced focus will be their downfall. It happened before, and it'll happen again.

Oddly enough though, despite how great Firefox is, it's taken a while to gain control of the market. Why you might ask? Well, the first reason involves inertia. Namely Microsoft's. They control the majority of the market, and have for quite a while.

Their browser is also embedded into their OS, so it's the perfect solution for the lazy. IE, why bother with downloading a browser when one is already included in the OS? That's the mentality of a lot of people. And there's nothing wrong with it, except that ease of acquisition shouldn't be the first and only step in choosing a browser.

Another reason Firefox is great (or better than IE) is the extensions system. It makes Firefox flexible enough to be easily usable for anyone, and allows features to be added without weighting down the browser. Especially if they're features that only a handful of people want.

This also frees up the developers to concentrate on the important core features and leave these fringe extras to others who are willing to create them. And you don't have to worry about getting stuck with a feature you may not use, while the core browser keeps its functionality down to only the core essentials, doing much to eliminate bloat and improve speed.

Firefox is also written with security in mind. IE is written with features in mind. Or at least that's the appearance given how it handles security issues. Of course, a lot of that laziness in design is likely due to the long period of time in which IE really had no competition.

During that time, Netscape was more or less on life support, Safari hadn't been invented yet, Opera was still a fringe browser (still is even today) and Mozilla was still in it's pre-1.0 development cycle. So for all intents and purposes, IE had no rivals or competitors.

But even before then the browser was all features and no security. This period of no competition increased that deficiency in security. It was only when Firefox, began to gain market share that IE 7 was even considered.

And that's likely because Microsoft saw something in the emerging Firefox that scared them senseless. I say this because, when Microsoft was competing against Netscape, the new releases came fast and furious. Once they had put down their major competition, all innovation stopped cold.

That rush of “innovation” of course restarted when Firefox began to steal their market share and appear as a real threat. Kinda funny how that works, isn't it? They only act when their bottom line is threatened.

And yet Firefox never blinked. They just kept developing, adding new features, exploring new options, and giving people what they wanted. It's one of the things that makes Open Source so great. And it's one of the things that will bring down IE. And Microsoft at some point I surmise.

Firefox also doesn't go into flashy ads and over hyped nonsense in it's marketing. It just presents the facts and lets you decide. It treats you like a normal human being with plenty of intelligence to decide for yourself what's best.

Microsoft on the other hand loves the flashy ads, assuming that the population is easily swayed by the “Ooo, shiny” mentality. That's like saying that everyone's dumb as a brick and only the shiniest object will get their approval.

Another great feature, if you can call it a feature, of Firefox is the developers. I've found them to be realistic, down to earth people who tend to be rather humble. Or at the very least they're not all “in your face” about what they do.

But that's not all of what makes Firefox so great. But I'll spare you the details and let you find those out on your own. Overall though, it's been a fun ride to 3.5, and I suspect it will continue being a fun ride way up into 7.0 and beyond.

The only question next is, what'll happen after IE is defeated? (*laugh*) Who cares? Firefox isn't competing against anyone, except maybe itself. So the death of a major competitor really means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Discuss this! ( 0 comments )

Raiden's Realm Social Bookmarking
If you have any problems with any of these links, please let us know. Thanks.

Average vistor rating: 3.7 out of 5 (9 total votes)