[Am-info] Hunting with Firefox

[Erick Andrews]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1346519,00.html

Firefox has gained about 3% market share at Microsoft's expense.
Here's the text of the article:

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Leader Tuesday November 9, 2004

The Guardian Today marks a milestone in the history of the "open
source" movement, the extraordinary unpaid community of
volunteers all over the world who work together to produce
software which is placed in the public domain without commercial
gain.  Today sees the official launch of Firefox
(www.getfirefox.com), a free internet browser that is daring to
take on Internet Explorer, owned by Microsoft, which until
recently had a market share of over 95%.  It roundly beat
Netscape (originally known as Mosaic) during the late 1990s in
what became known as the browser war.

Well, the second browser war is about to begin and the signs are
it will be very interesting.  Microsoft has an embedded
advantage, not just because of its $50bn-plus cash reserves, but
because Windows has a near-monopoly of the operating system
inside personal computers.  It comes pre-loaded with Explorer -
so users need a good reason to overcome inertia and switch to
something else.

Firefox believes it has that reason, a nimble, easy-to-install
browser that has new features, keeps out irritating "pop-up"
advertisements and claims much more security against most of the
bugs and viruses that have riddled Explorer.  It aims to take
10% of the browser market during the next eight months and says
that 7 million people have already downloaded it from the web.
As a result Firefox has come from nowhere to 3% of the market
before being officially released and Explorer has lost market
share for five months to just under 93%.  In response to an
appeal to buy an advertisement in the New York Times, more than
10,000 Firefox users donated more than $250,000, much more than
asked for.

Firefox deserves to succeed, but even if it does not it will
have highlighted the astonishing success of open source, well
known inside the web community but not outside.  Among other
services, it has its own operating system (Linux), an acclaimed
alternative to Microsoft Office (OpenOffice), and its own
encyclopedia (Wikipedia) with a million entries.  The open
source movement has become one of globalisation's unexpected
treasures.

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Erick Andrews