Stop Microsoft
All Things Microsoft => Microsoft as a Company => Topic started by: MrX on 28 February 2005, 08:09
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IN DEPTH: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
From the February 25, 2005 print edition
Firefox browser ignites a fire under complacent Microsoft
Janet Rae-Dupree
When Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer to crush Netscape during Browser War I in the 1990s, the Web surfing application that comes pre-installed on every new Windows PC appeared invincible.
Click Here
Look out for Browser War II. The opening salvos came last November in the form of Firefox, a wildly popular open-source browser conceived by a 19-year-old Stanford University sophomore and polished by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation based in Mountain View.
With 25 million downloads in its first 99 days, Firefox -- with versions compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac's OS X -- has turned into a firestorm. Already, Firefox has a 5 percent market share, taking virtually all of its business from the dominant IE browser. So far, Firefox's spread shows no sign of slowing.
"You all are spreading Firefox to a quarter of a million people a day," crowed the youthful creator, Blake Ross, under the headline "Do you all ever sleep?" on the SpreadFirefox.com community blog Feb. 16. "What was just a small flame 100 days ago has since exploded into a phenomenal demonstration of the power of open source."
In fact, without Netscape's decision in early 1998 to release the original code for its browser to the open source community, Firefox never would have existed. Call it, if you will, "Son of Netscape." The code that Mr. Ross modified to create Firefox came from Mozilla, the name given Netscape's browser after its code was released.
While most open-source software is used primarily by techies and enterprises (see main story, page 15), Firefox is generating the most enthusiastic consumer response the community has ever seen. Fed up with the security flaws and pop-up ads plaguing Internet Explorer, users are singing Firefox 1.0's praises and downloading it as fast as the Mozilla Foundation's servers can dish it out.
Now the open-source community awaits the reaction to Firefox 1.1, which Mozilla has scheduled for a "preview" release in April.
"Overall, they're gaining lots of attention," analyst Robert Lerner of Current Analysis told TechWeb News last week. Despite that, however, he doesn't expect Firefox will ever overtake Microsoft's IE. "That's not going to happen, but over time there may be pressure placed on Microsoft," he says. Firefox "is gathering steam and gaining traction."
Microsoft has noticed. After saying late last year that Microsoft would focus its efforts on Longhorn -- the new operating system whose release has been pushed back to 2006 -- Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates told developers at the RSA Conference in San Francisco earlier this month that Internet Explorer security upgrades would regain some priority. Beta testing of IE 7.0 is scheduled for some time in April.
Even as Microsoft moves to defend its dominant position, however, others are wading into the growing melee. America Online just started beta testing its own stand-alone browser. Ask Jeeves is negotiating with the Mozilla Foundation to build a branded browser for it based on the Firefox code.
And while Google will neither confirm nor deny rumors that it is working on its own browser, tongues have been wagging furiously since Google hired Firefox's lead engineer, Ben Goodger, and a key Mozilla developer, Darin Fisher. Both men say Google plans to let them continue working on Mozilla-related and open-source projects, but neither would reveal what their Google-specific responsibilities will be.
The Mozilla Foundation isn't resting on its laurels. In December, it released an e-mail client, Thunderbird, one of the first open-source competitors to Microsoft's Outlook. Only a bit more than one million downloads have been recorded so far-- Firefox saw a million downloads on its release date -- but analyst acknowledge that it can be more troublesome to switch e-mail clients than it is to switch browsers.
JANET RAE-DUPREE is the Business Journal's technology editor. Reach her at (408) 299-1840.
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I wonder if they're going to add any new features like tabbed browsing and a faster rendering engine.
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let's see if microsoft still has what it takes to cripple the competition in an underhanded and dirty browser war, in a world where the competition are no longer doe eyed idealists, and the legal system is no longer in the sixties...
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I wonder if they're going to add any new features like tabbed browsing and a faster rendering engine.
I would settle for a standards-compliant rendering engine....
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I wonder if they're going to add any new features like tabbed browsing and a faster rendering engine.
I hardly consider those to be 'new' features when the competition has been using them for the better part of 7 years.
I just wished MS would see sense and let IE6 die as it should have 2 years ago. Its not even a proper 6th generation browser. And even IE7 doesn't look like its going to pass the grade as a 7th generation browser.
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Microsoft has done some things to Internet Explorer in their Service Pack 2 of Windows XP.
But it's too late, and it only applies to Windows XP users who did upgrade.
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Wow they've fixed some security issues and added a pop-up blocker!
That's a total of 1 extra feature!
But their new version won't need longhorn as it will run on XP, I don't know about Windows 2000 though.
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Microsoft's guise of incompetency works to their advantage on many occasions. They're far from incompetent; they likely have some of the best employees in the world. Stuff like lack of standards compliance is totally intentional, and works toward their goal of monopolizing data. What we're talking about is potentially a decade or farther away in the mind of Microsoft, but the long term goal is to create a Microsoft standard that all others are judged by; if data is not presented in this standard, then it is not accessible on 90% of the desktops in the world. MS knows very well that they have tremendous potential to control economics, politics, and socialization with far greater efficiency than any government has. This is why you should not be using Microsoft, IE, or any other crap.
By appearing incompetent they just draw geeks' attention away from the real problems. The same tactics play themselves in the political arena as well. Microsoft made this strategical connection a long time ago; so did RMS, but no one listened. Apple missed the point because they wanted individual empowerment through technology, and never factored in the destruction less altruistic individuals would later cause.
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Unfortunatly, IE comes standard with OSX too, but as soon as i got it, u no where i put it? staight in the bin. then i downloaded Firefox. Ive also got Camino (OSX only ;)) and that also runs great. Unfortunatly, the Microsuck forums aren't compatible with it, so im stuck with Firefox. there's always safari, but it looks boring :D.
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It still comes with a default OS X installation, but Apple moved it out of the dock and made Safari the default browser at 10.3.
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internet explorer, while it is still not a lot of cop, is (in my humble opinion) a better browser on macintosh systems.
i heard this is because a different team developed it, and of course, the mac developers for IE didn't have all that "integrated into the browser" hoo haa creating pressure from above.
but anyway...
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IE for Mac OS 9 was great. No complaints from me really and I despise Microsoft. The carbonized OS X version was a different story though. When Safari arrived MS declared that "there's no sense in competing with a pack-in browser" and quit updating IE for Mac. Ironic, isn't it? The best part was when they claimed Safari would be inherently better because Apple had access to the internal workings of OS X and Microsoft did not, which is BS. Camino and Firefox are doing just fine.
From a standards perspective, Mac IE was no doubt more compliant than any Windows version.
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It still comes with a default OS X installation, but Apple moved it out of the dock and made Safari the default browser at 10.3.
And it doesn't install by default, when installing you go into the custom installation and set it up.
And IE was NEVER good at any stage I've found. Netscape 6 was a bit awful but IE was worse.
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I have a feeling MS might actually make IE 7 a half decent browser. Well if they do they'll probably just copy FireFox and Opera anyway. This would still be shit as they continue to bastardise the standard and take over the Internet.
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Or that they'll intergrate it with windows even tighter and "accidentally" change the API for apps so that it breaks firefox...
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I have a feeling MS might actually make IE 7 a half decent browser. Well if they do they'll probably just copy FireFox and Opera anyway. This would still be shit as they continue to bastardise the standard and take over the Internet.
IE is copied (or stolen, or bought out) anyway. The origanal was called Mosaic and was made by the NCSA. I dont think MS is clever enough to actually construct their OWN browser, you know, from scratch.
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it was bought from its then owners, mosaic was the browser made by the people who went on to form their own company and develop the first netscape browser.
IE has (so i have heard) been completely redesigned etc since the mosaic days though.
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My brief experience with FireFox is plenty enough to tell me that it is a load (or two) better than the as-cheap-as-possible/useless/Microsoft IE. BTW, I switched because of Microsuck.com (the fora), so thanks F***MS.com!
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so thanks F***MS.com!
We were formally FuckMicrosoft.com and our pussy webmaster changed the name, and yes it is ok to swear on this forum.
:fu: :fu: :fu: Microsoft.
FUCK MICROSOFT!
:fu: :fu: :fu: Microsoft.
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We were formally FuckMicrosoft.com and our pussy webmaster changed the name, and yes it is ok to swear on this forum.
:fu: :fu: :fu: Microsoft.
FUCK MICROSOFT!
:fu: :fu: :fu: Microsoft.
Don't call our Great and Glorious webmaster a pussy. He did it to attrack more visitors in the hope that more people would refrain from using a Microsoft product.
And yes, you're allowed to say either fuck, shit, piss, motherfucker, cocksucker, cunt or tit here...
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Don't call our Great and Glorious webmaster a pussy. He did it to attrack more visitors in the hope that more people would refrain from using a Microsoft product.
Sorry everything about this site is great (apart from its name) and the webmaster has done a good job apart from changing it's name.
Sorry Refalm I know we've been here before, I just like to mock this websites name, it should be MicroFuck.com!
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We still have the domain name. In fact, assuming that ComSense remembered to renew them, we should have near a dozen domains.
fuckmicrosoft.com/org
fuckbillgates.com/net/org
windows-sucks.com
fuckwindows[2000|XP].com
Among others.
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We still have the domain name. In fact, assuming that ComSense remembered to renew them, we should have near a dozen domains.
fuckmicrosoft.com/org
fuckbillgates.com/net/org
windows-sucks.com
fuckwindows[2000|XP].com
Among others.
Don't forget
http://www.freemypc.com
http://www.freemypc.net
http://www.freemypc.org
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Yup, I sure agree. I only wrote F***MS because I was lazy and at first just wrote fms, but that wasn't clear, so I added the asterisks. Anyway...
FUCK MICROSOFT from me too... I love this site...
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If anyone actually read anything it was because FuckMicrosoft was turning people away - the site is perfectly family-friendly but the name isn't.
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You forgot FuckApple.com (http://www.fuckapple.com/).
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That's my favorite one! How could I forget? :scared: